The best way to monitor this flare is to go to http://www.sel.noaa.gov/rt_plots/pro_3d.html, which is the plot of proton flux measured by satellite GOES-8, averaged on a 5-minute period.
The 3 curves are the "event counts" for particles with an energy of at least 10, 50 and 100 MeV respectively. The curve has been leaping 4 orders of magnitude (10,000-fold) in the last 24-hours. Quite a nice flare.
If you have the dubious privilege of working at a large helpdesk, it would be interesting to see if the number of computer crashes actually increases. Modern, ultra-dense DRAM chips are requiring only minute energies to flip a bit, and this flare should provide more than enough SEUs (single-event upsets), even at sea level, to trigger random bitflips all over the world.
Anyone cares to provide empirical stats?
Sysadms who are in the process of a corporate deployment of Windows 2000 need not answer: We know you'll see plenty of random crashes:-).
It's interesting to note that these events (the July 13 2000 mega-flare and this one) happened during a solar maximum, i.e., the peak of a 11-year solar cycle.
Note that in spite of documented variations (e.g. the "Maunder Minimum" from 1650 to 1700, where cold climate coincided with very low solar spot counts), solar emissions are assumed to be constant in numerical climate simulation models. Which explains why these simulations are not exactly accurate.
Washington (Rooters): In a bold move to preserve the American way of life, Senator Howlers introduced a bill that would outlaw most chocolates, including Lindt and Nestle.
Howlers explained that this was an emergency bill: "These brands of food are unsafe. They generate a rush of sugar that is demonstrably dangerous. Hords of teens running on sugar high regularly go online and hack into National Defense computers."
Moreover, Howlers said that many popular brands of gourmet chocolate had a suspiciously foreign origin: "Many people start swapping slabs of high-cocoa chocolate in school, and import these foods from nations connected to Bin Laden's network. Do you know where most of these chocolates come from? Switzerland and France. There are several Middle East banks in the center of Geneva, I've seen pictures, they must be up to something. As for the French, they are plotting against us since they started selling these goddamn Airbus instead of buying good old Boeings. And my good friends in Avon even told me the French have the brazen gall of competing against them in the cosmetics sector. These evil acts cannot remain unpunished. From lipstick to dynamite stick, there is a clear path of potential terror here."
Howlers does not stop here in his sacred mission of protecting the American public. "Every scientist will tell you that this chocolate thing is addictive," he adds. "You start with Nestle, and soon you're hooked on 70-percent cocoa Lindt. From there the victim is sucked into an inferno of dark-stained teeth and smeared fingers. Plus, the farts are really unbearable."
Our valliant lawmaker has a solution to replace the imported food. "Cat food sandwich. That's right. Toast some bead, pop a can open, and here you go, have a delicious sandwich made of all-american poultry, beef or fish offals. It's not addictive, it does not give you a high, it does not worsen the trade deficit, and it doesn't stain clothes. Gourmets even eat it with a spoon out of the can."
Asked if it would not restrict basic freedoms, Howlers drove the point home: "We are compelled to protect the American way of life. If it's good enough for our pets, it's good enough for the rest of us. The catastrophe of September 11 clearly gives us the moral duty of getting rid of our complacency, even if we have to face a few inconvenience. I agree that popping open a can of Purina is harder than ripping up a Hershley pack. But we'll work on this issue."
I know that the comparison goes only that far, but if the gas utility company gets a few reports that there is a gas odor floating around your house, they'll immediately shut down your gas meter. Then, maybe, they'll try to call you. More likely, they'll wait for you to call.
This is considered as a commendable attitude. Safety first. The utility doesn't want other customers to have problems because you are clueless about your gas heater's pilot light.
The real question is: do we want utility companies to refuse to sell us gas until we have passed a HVAC professional certification and are demonstrably competent fixing all gas-burning appliances problem? Of couse not. So by default we accept to be considered morons and to be shut off at the first alert.
Similarly, should ISP mandate system administration training for their $14.99 a month customers? Nope, they shut them off.
And honestly, I prefer to be assumed uncompetent rather than to have countless organization monitor my skills, training and job history.
In my not so humble opinion, all we'll see at first when the Earth Sim is fired up is that the best climate evolution models are awfully wrong. The nice thing about this machine is that it's powerful enough to run a large number of model variations and see how they produce the expected result. But the researchers will follow this time-honored pattern of numerical simulation:
1. Create an initial state matrix (here, climate and parameters from N years ago)
2. Apply model, iterate it for N years
3. Compare to current condition (current climate)
4. See gross discrepancies. Shake head in disbelief. Go back to 1.
The problem is that every of these steps is hard. Step 1 requires a very accurate, very fine-grained depiction of initial parameters. Even today, we just don't have that! In meteorological (weather forecast) computing, the initial condition matrix is created by complex non-linear interpolations from a limited set of observations that also are not all collected at the same point in time. Creation of this initial condition data set takes actually longer than the weather forecast run! This is a major hurdle. Now, can you guess how such a data set would be prepared for, say, year 1800, where weather stations were rether scarce? Yep, that's right, by guessing. Which means the very accurate computations will be based on very rough guesses. Discutable results at best.
Then, the "apply model" run. Hah. Our climate models are, to say the least, inaccurate. We don't understand the physics of climate yet. Also, we assume some things like "the solar constant", which says that the amount of energy coming from the sun is constant. It's not. You have variations on an 11-year cycle (solar spots) and a bigger variation on a 208-year period. Oh, not much, it varies by less than a percent. But it's enough to strongly affect the climate. See paper "Solar Forcing of Drought Frequency in the Maya Lowlands" in Science of 18 May 2001 to see how this solar oscillation wreaked havoc in the Maya civilization. And last time I checked, this phenomenon was not taken in account by standard climate models.
Step 3 is easy... if you're comparing your results with modern-era climate. But if you are running a simulation on the evolution of an ice-age 120,000 years ago, it's pretty hard to check the result's accuracy.
Step 4 requires more money. And that's where the current hype about climate change and warming was useful for scientists (and not just for companies who market costly, unsafe replacements for the cheap, inert, non-toxic, banned freon). Climatologists have finally been able to get big funding in some places, instead of being an arcane, underpowered science.
The cautious./er will remember, if he's old enough, that during the Seventies, the "experts" warned us about the upcoming ice-age. I remember reading sci-fi books about state-cities trapped in underground caves below the 2-mil thick ice and fighting each other for proteins and uranium fuel... The same experts now warn us about the upcoming warming. When should we believe them?
My point exactly. Of course, total security is a fallacy, but using a system or a method that is demonstrably risky is plain dumb.
So yes, corporate IS departments keep installing Windows all over the place even in places where they could avoid it because "that's what the market is".
Imagine this discussion:
Landlord: "Hey, you built my home on quicksands!"
Architect: "Quicksands are the market standard. No one uses hard ground these days. Too hard to break."
Landlord: "But it's unsafe! People get the Blue Gas-Bubble of Death every day in these quicksands! Alligators come and snatch you from behind!"
Architect: "Come on, just stand on the moss patches and you'll be fine".
Of course, at the end the landlord shoots the architect, to the acclaim of the whole profession.
One would hope that the numerous bugs and securities loopholes in Windows, and their exploits by Windows worms, would be a wake up call for Corporate IS managers all over the world. Time to sanitize and secure the computing environment, right?
Hah.
Actually, in spite of the huge annoyance caused by these worms, the IS in my Big Company did not bulge. Windows 2000 it is, Linux is for techies, no plan change. A timid note has been sent around saying that IIS servers should be checked against infection... of Code Red. How timely.
I guess the disaster recovery plan of these people still involves some backup server located in the WTC.
For the sake of future air travellers, I hope that we take airport security more seriously than computer security.
Who needs Ben Laden when you have Bill Gates to sabotage the Western world?:-)
-- SysKoll
Airport security and non-metallic handguns
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More On Tragedy
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· Score: 1
Maybe Israel will reconsider its policy in the Middle-East. Maybe
they'll allow a Palestinian state to be created. Maybe they'll
reconsider a policy of targeted elimination that has been creating
martyrs and orphans willing to die by the truckload.
Or maybe they'll decide to solve the Palestinian problem the way
the early Americans solved the Ameridian problem.
Maybe we'll all get along together some day.
Maybe.
Meanwhile, we'll need to secure our airports. It means that we'll
need to prevent weapons from being smuggled on-board and be used by
terrorists.
Now, I have read reports saying that the terrorists threatened
pilots with knives. It seems a pretty unreliable means to curb pilots
and attendants into submission. Assume the knife reports are true. It
is then likely that the terrorists threatened only one person at a
time and prevented the other flight personnels to attack them by
pretending they would detonate explosives.
So Western airports still need to insure that firearms and
explosives cannot be sneaked into planes. That's very hard with
current X-Ray and magnetic detection technology.
Handguns made mostly out of non-metallic synthetic materials are
now available (I checked the Heckler und Koch web site but couldn't
find a link to their rumored plastic HK-9). The only metallic part is
the recoil spring. Even bullets can be made of hard plastic and still
be lethal even if they have no great penetration power.
But the one thing that cannot be replaced is the nitrogen-based
propulsive powder in the cartridges. The same is true for explosives:
barring exotic, unstable compounds, all military and construction
explosives use nitrogen-based molecules. The three bondings of
nitrogen release a high energy when broken and are the staple of explosives.
That's where detection methods offer hope.
Various technologies (neutrography and variants of MRI) could be used
to build machines that detect 100% of known explosives in all luggage,
as well as explosives and ammo carried or swallowed by passengers.
The real problems would be the following:
Would passengers freely submit to a "virtual frisk", i.e.,
being scanned by a machine as intrusive as X-Rays?
Would passengers or taxpayers accept to bear the cost of
equipping all airports with these multiple copies of these new
detectors costing several million dollars a pop (even after factoring cost
reduction effects of large series)?
Would the same passengers cheerfully accept the inevitable false alarms triggered by sensitive equipment with low detection thresholds?
If the answer to a single one of these question is no, then forget all
pretense of ever securing airports. Be ready to install anti-aircraft
batteries around each city and accept the occasional accidental
shooting of a misguided aircraft...
Say you can make $100/hour as a consultant. With this $100, you can buy an item that would require 4 to 6 hours of high-level quest for an experienced character. You don't have enough time to play online for days continuously, yet this is about the only method to reach a level where most monsters don't kill you by Sneezing on you.
So doesn't it make sense?
As for whether or not this is a "problem": let people do as they please with their money, as long as they don't harm other people.
Re:Is Intel fighting the Laws of computation?
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Itanium Update
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· Score: 1
Thanks for the explanation. I know that some modern compilers include runtime feedback to reoptimize the code as more profiling data points are collected. But I am not aware that these optimizations are available in the IA-64 compilers. A cursory check of Intel's website did not reveal anything conclusive.
HP might make them available for the IA-64 line, but their R&D is now in considerable turmoil due to the acquisition of Compaq whose own R&D dept will have to be integrated with HP's, forcing a major reorg. So I'll not bet on anything smart coming from this side of HP for a few months.
Can someone point to an announcement or paper showing that IA-64 compilers are using or will use that kind of dynamic optimization?
There is actually a way to soften the sonic boom by lenghtnening the plane.
What makes a sharp sonic boom is the dissipation of a lot of energy over a small distance. You can't do much to lower the energy of a plane's shockwave when it reaches Mach 1, but you can expand the area over which that energy will be concentrated. This is done by lenghtening the cone-shaped high-pressure shockwave that surrounds the plane.
This way, the shockwave's pressure gradient is spread over a longer surface (roughly a cone starting from the tip of the plane), and thus, with the same pressure difference over a bigger distance, the gradient is lower.
The sonic boom's enery is the same, but since it's spread over a longer distance and hence a longer time, it gives less instantaneous power. So you have a flattened pulse that is theoretically muffled, instead of a sharp spike. (If you want to visualize the concept, burn a candle, then explode a hand grenade. See, the total energy was roughly the same, but the grenade produced it in a sharp spike.)
The resulting experimental plane looks like the old supersonic fighters of the 60's, with a cone tip that looks way too long for modern standards.
There was an article about this in Aviation Week but their web site is subscribers only.
It's a good question, and the answer is "roughly c/3". But it's not the whole picture.
Signal propagation in chips is not limited just by the speed of light. You have leaks due to line capacitance, which also induces coupling (crosstalk) between adjacent lines. If you send a nice square pulse on a 3-mm long straight metal line crossing half a chip (I've seen it!) you'll get an ugly, slow-rising pulse full of parasites picked by crosstalk on its way. And, oh, it will also bounce so badly that you better be prepared to sustain NEGATIVE voltages.
Want more fun? Get a 500-MHz signal on a metal line, and have the line do a sharp 90-degree turn. Everything then happens as if most electrons you send miss the turn and keep moving on their trajectory as bullets from a railgun. Not only will your signal be badly attenuated, it will also induce a crazy crosstalk in anything near that 90-degree corner.
See why chip designers become crazy? Sometimes you wonder how something as simple as an electron can be such a devious little bastard.:-)
Excellent point. The propagation delays are now about 50-70% of the clock cycle of a modern digital chip at the current speeds of several hundred MHz.
So any improvement of the semiconductor commutation speed is just a "nice to have" technology these days. Think of it. Assume that your chip spends 70% of its time waiting for signal propagation. Even if you suddenly get your transistors to switch instantly (that is, infinitely fast), you'll only increase the speed of a cycle by 100/70 = 1.43, or 43%. And then no more improvements.
That's why the biggest performance increases will now come from breakthrough in signal propagation speed: Copper wires, low-K dielectric, and more layers for denser circuits.
-- SysKoll
Is Intel fighting the Laws of computation?
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Itanium Update
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· Score: 1
There is a famous naysayer who pretends that IA-64 is doomed to be an underperformer. The problem with this naysayer is:
1. He's often hard to understand.
2. He's dead.
His name is Alan Turing.
I'll shamelessly quote myself here. Here's an excerpt of an article
in The Register in which I said:
The problem is that the only way to predict what a program
will do is to run it (that's a consequence of Turing's
theorem). A classical processor executes the program code and
knows what happens with the current data (loops, jumps, etc). It can
infer locality relationship from its instruction flow and make
on-the-fly optimizations. Meanwhile, the compiler of an non-optimizing
VLIW processor such as the IA-64 can only look at the code beforehand
and make assumptions about what kind of data that code will
process. Turing's theorem says that the only way to know what a
program will do with a given data set is to execute the program.
Thus the theorem predicts that the IA-64 pre-compiled
optimization will always be inferior to a good on-the-fly RISC
processor. At best, the precompiled optimization will yield an optimal
path for a given set of assumptions, which may not be true on every
run, since run-time data can defeat these assumptions.
I'd gladly be proved wrong. Can someone please tell me why Turing
is wrong and Intel right? Or is Intel fighting an uphill battle
against Uncle Alan's laws?
Funny how some old problems keep coming back to haunt in in
microelectronics. During the '80s, the static discharge problem was a
big, bad, recognized problems. I remember cringing at the area
"wasted" by ESD diods protecting the I/Os of 4-bit
microcontrollers. (What do you mean, I am old? Beware of my cane,
young fool!)
Then ESD prevention became part of the run-of-the-mill process, and
not much attention was paid to it anymore. From time to time, though,
a grim-faced test engineer showed up with a microphotography of a
(relatively) huge hole in a faulty chip analyzed for default
characterization, and asked for some extra grounding to be added on a
new wafer manipulation station. But that was about it.
Now the problem is back again. What happened?! Well, the ESD
absorbtion device don't shrink very well. So smaller chips with huge
I/O counts mean that the chip real estate occupied by ESD prevention
is a major nuisance now, and then there is the issue of the
ever-decreasing geometry size while the static voltage are remaining
constant.
So Moore's law makes the problem worse, not better. Now add the
packaging of consumer device, which is increasingly shoddy (whatever
happened to metal shields inside consumer devices?). Maybe someday
we'll have to be as cautious around our consumer electronics as we
once were around a memory expansion board.
#include <memories.h>: Once I was working in a customer's
building where a programming lab had been hastily installed. A
synthetic carpet had been laid over the old hardwood floor. The old
heaters were dessicating the air so much our lips hurt. Enter a young,
skinny woman wearing three layers of acrylic sweaters, as well as hose
and plastic-sole sneakers. She reached down to insert a diskette into
the Unix server. We all heard an audible crack when a 10-inch long
spark jumped from her hand to the keyswitch. She yelped. We moaned:
the server has crashed. Postmortem revealed that the processor
detected an ECC failure during memory access. So the massive ESD had
scrambled the bus. But it restarted OK.
Ground-strap these skinny girls during the winter!
--SysKoll
Cool AIX features that Linux would need first
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IBM Wants Linux
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· Score: 1
Having administered a dozen of RS/6000 running AIX, I can testify that
AIX has some really cool features that Linux would really
need. Actually, it is my belief that Linux will never replace
commercial Unices if it doesn't include these features. Let's see:
JFS: The IBM Journaled File System has been
ported to Linux. Why bother, you'd ask? Well, case in point: Picture a
CAD lab where a dozen engineers are busy designing PCBs (Printed
Circuit Boards). Enters the cleaning contractor. She plugs her
industrial vaccuum cleaner in the UPS strip and then bangs the blasted
vac into a concrete pillar. A small spark sound can be heard,
instantly followed by the loud clack of the UPS short protection
switching off. Six RS/6000 go down with a pitiful decrescendo of
spinning-down hard disks and fans. Twelve engineers gasp. Yep, I was
there.
When they removed the vac and restarted the UPS, all the AIX
machines came up flawlessly, no lost file, no corrupted file system,
no nothing, thanks to the JFS. The engineers had lost only the work
done since the last autosave. Oh, and they bought a broom for that
lab.
SMIT: System Management Interface Tool. Way
Cool. It's a menu system that can be used to compose system
administration commands. You choose your task through a menu/submenu
tree. SMIT shows you a form to fill with reasonable defaults, lets you
query possible values for the fields, and allows you to see what the
final command looks like for your education. Great for bringing rookie
sysadms up to speed. The useability of SMIT has been fine-tuned at
least as heavily as the vaunted ease of use of Microsoft apps (but
without the paperclip). SMIT also keeps you (up to a point) from
shooting yourself in the foot, and offer an UNDO for many
commands.
Drawback: The very concept of SMIT requires to override
the basic Unix principle of configuration files. The files are
modified by SMIT to reflect the changes in the OMD, an object-oriented
configuration database. If you manually edit the files, the OMD will
override these changes.
Auto-recover: You can recover a whole system by
booting off a backup tape. It will create the volumes, the file systems, the
devices, the users, etc. No sysadm should be deprived of this great feature.
Volume management : You can extend file systems on
the fly, without unmounting them, across disk boundaries if
needed. 'Nuff said.
If IBM is serious about Linux replacing AIX, they'll port
SMIT. Encouragingly, they already ported JFS and open-sourced
it. Meanwhile, Linux could use the on-the-fly extensibility.
How to put MS Office and other non-text documents under version control
I ran into the same problem a few years ago for documents produced
by various word processors. I was the tech lead (translate:
responsability without the pay) of a small team. We had documents
coming from a variety of sources, and we were using RCS, which is the
underlying mechanism for CVS, rather than CVS per se.
When we had a "foreign" document landing in our e-mail, our
solution for keeping track of it was to imbed an RCS identification
string ("$Id$") in that document. Some document format supported
comment (invisible) fields, which was nice. Otherwise, we had to use
some "invisible" string, such as a 1-pt header on a page. That worked
for RTF documents as well as some weird formats such as Quark XPress,
and even a PostScript file from the guy doing the cover of the manual on
a Mac. That's because these formats are basically text.
Thing are more complicated when you get binary formats such as some
MS Office native format docs. Assume you cannot reject the doc and
require an RTF version (that is covered by the previous case). Then
you need to set up a script that converts the binary document into
Base64, slaps an $Id$ field in it and check it into your
repository. Conversely, a check out requires you to remove the Id line
and convert the Base64-encoded text file back into binary. I'd gladly
cut-and-paste the 10-line Ksh code, but our lawyers want us to go through our
"open-sourcing software committee" first.:-) You can automate the
process within the CVS server.
How to have non-geek use CVS from their DOS/Win machine
I had to teach my team to use RCS. Since then, cool GUI programs
appeared, such as WinCVS (Check http://sourceforge.net/projects/cvsgui/. The
site www.wincvs.org wasn't
responding when I wrote this.) This is a GUI program that allows even
an accountant to use a CVS server with a minimum of hand-holding. Give it a try.
Very interesting comment. You said you were adding CALEA to a cell phone network. Unless I am mistaken, this is a federal-mandated packet-level tapping that allows law enforcement authority to copy all packets going through a certain telecom operator and have them forwarded to the comfort and safety of their offices, without even having to go put a tape in a recorder. Is that right?
Now, can you please tell us how widely CALEA is deployed? Also, is the access to the tapping function well secured? Or can any cop click on a mouse and listen to anyone?
while(feds == involved)
{
paranoia++;
}
This technology is old hat already, the trade press has been writing about it for years.
Advantages:
supple plastic circuits
Mostly transparent
Low cost once the process is established
Drawbacks
The electron mobility of these plastic semicond junctions suck. So this is good only for low-speed circuits. I'm not sure this is even good enough for the few MHz of CD-A audio decoding.
Concerns about chemical instability. These plastic circuits will have a low density, a low-cost packaging, and hence offer a huge surface to pollution by environment reactants. Ozone can make holes in the latex of condoms, guess what it can do to a semiconductor thin film exposed to air.
A often-quoted great app is the head-up display for cars: a transparent set of electonic circuits that you glue on your windshield and contains its own display. UV protection films are mandatory for keeping the circuits from burning in the summer, but it looks feasable and cheaper than the usual optical projection solutions.
Don't sell that $12 million 193-nm optical stepper in your silicon fab, though. We're not there yet, especially for medium or high speed circuits.
Finally a short, precise and to the point explanation! I was starting to despair. Thanks, jjlaw.
I heard on the radio that some newsblabbers were warning against the "dangers" of nuclear power generation. Well, sure, Chernobyl and stuff.
But nobody considers the dangers of thermal power plants. A few years ago, a huge fire started at a French refinery in a heavy oil storage tank. (Heavy oil is the very dense oil that you burn in oil-power thermal plants). Six workers died. Huge pollution. Also, last year, France suffered from a major marine pollution when a tanker loaded with heavy oils, apparently destined to yet another thermal power plant, broke in a storm. All beaches on the Northern Atlantic front were slick with oil.
As for natural gas plants, there are major explosions during natural gas transports (trains and trucks mainly) every year. It is reasonable to assume a good percentage of these transports are destined to butane-propane thermal plants.
It would be interesting to find statistics about accidents in the oil refinery and transport industry, and correlate it with the percentage of this oil consumed by thermal power plants. This would put the nuclear power risks in perspective.
Get this -- in the USA, charitable giving by the
rich is MORE THAN TEN TIMES as
high as it is in Europe! Studies credit most of
this difference to the inheritance tax,
spurring the wealthy to use their money to buy
fame and gratitude, rather than let Uncle
Sam decide how it will be spent.
Well, as a French guy, I can assure you that the inheritance tax in most european countries is absolutely staggering. In France, it's 33% (yep, one third). Inherit a $90,000 appartment? You owe the taxman a cool $30,000 plus various notarial fees (for appraisal). Generally, you end up selling it at a fraction of its value. No buyer? No big deal, the State just confiscate it.
So, According to Mr. Brin's reasoning, this ought to be a mighty powerful incentive for charity, right? Wrong: Charity donations per inhabitant in Europe are well below the US level, even after adjustment for GNP ratio.
The real incentive of the massive US donations seems different. It might be that the European non-gouvernmental charities are lobbying for subsides and are getting it from governments, and don't waste time on raising funds from individuals. It might also be a different tax dedu ction structure, which makes tax-lowering through donations much more efficient in the US than in Europe.
So I am afraid that Brin's whole line of reasoning is built on faulty assumptions and faulty data.
Disclaimer: I don't vote in the US, obviously, but I hate to see a "scientist" throw hogwash to defend a political agenda.
--SysKoll
P.S. Also,we all know that Hemos is a frippin' liberal already, don't we:-) ? So this feature is pretty useless.
I hate to rain on this parade of optimism, but there is a hard limit on the lithography process that everyone here seem to have overlooked.
This problem is the size of the photosensitive compound molecule. Whatever the wavelenght you use, you have to impress a photosensitive resin with your ever-finer optical patterns. And the problem is that this molecule is big. We are already reaching a point where the size of the photoresist molecule is not negligeable anymore.
In a few years, at around 0.02 microns, we'll reach the operational size of the smallest photoresist blob that can be physically impressed with a photon. So even if the wavalength keeps decreasing, we'll still have that blob size as the choke point.
Moreover, the new photoresists for 0.113-micrometer laser are far from being perfect. They are still way too temperamental for production use. And nobody has anything better coming up. None. No plans, no projects, no announcements.
Isn't that sad? For all the marvelous optical tricks that we pull in the micro-electronics industry, we are now roadblocked by a basic chemistry problem. Photoresist used to be a glorified paint job on top of a wafer that everyone was taking for granted, but it's back with a vengeance.
Conclusion: Unless we have a breakthrough in chemistry (not laser, not optics), the Moore law is dead when we reach 0.02 micron.
As a Frenchman, I've been very amused by the comments on the line of "France's gummint is after Gates, the poor bastard is doomed." Riiight.
Really check time. Let's take a look at a few past cases that were much, MUCH worse than MS's mere competition infringement. For instance, the contaminated blood affair. In a nutshell, France's official Blood Transfusion organization has collected blood in prisons (with a high percentage of seropositive and hepatitis-carrying drug addicts among donors), then batched the blood and extracted anticoagulant factors that were then transfused to haemophilic patients. The alarms from doctors were ignored, and the French gummint refused to authorize the American HIV test methods and waited almost a year for a French test to be perfected.
Result: France has now the lower percentage of haemophilia cases in the Western world, due to half of the patients dying from AIDS. This is the most efficient DNA-screening plan the world has ever seen.
The investigation revealed it all. The High Special Court was assembled for the first time ever to try the ministers and officials who covered this massive killing. The court sanction was severe: a blame for the culprits. I kid you not.
And that was for killing 1200 people. Of course, the perpetrators had the right connections, and they deposited some money into the adequate Socialist political funds.
So I'm sure that Bill Gates is very frightened of being blamed. If he's clever, he will make a fat campaign contribution for Jospin, the Socialist prime minister, and the whole affair will be forgotten.
Quit dreaming, people, if my country had some remnant of decency among its officials, I'd know it. Microsoft will certainly bribe its way out of this minor problem, with little or no damage. I'm not suggesting this is a planned extorsion setup, but you get the idea.
Reread Ayn Rand for a detailed description of said extorsion mechanism. And sorry for raining on your parade, kids.
The story about Echelon intercepting communications hit the intelligence community (and the electronic trade press) in France last year. So this isn't news, merely a report about old news.
The story started when Airbus lost a bid against Boeing in a very humiliating way. Boeing's price proposal was changed at the last minute and the new price was about 1 percent below the Airbus price. Other "miraculous" coincidences occured and rigged the game in Boeing's favor. Such uncanny timing and accuracy raised questions, and the Airbus executives wondered if their meeting rooms hadn't been bugged. An extensive investigation followed (we're talking about a bid of several billions US dollars here, pals.)
After a while, the results of the investigations leaked to the press. No Airbus exec had been bribed by Boeing, no phone tap nor bug was found. The only unsecure conversation between Airbus executives (about the bid) took place on GSM cellular phones. And GSM was though to be secure, except from the Echelon network.
So the conclusion was that Boeing was given access to GSM phone conversations tapped by Echelon in order for Boeing to win the bid. Since Boeing is a major taxpayer and the only remaining fighter jet maker, this makes sense from a US security point of view. Not very fair, but logical.
So far, only naive jerks would complain. This is competition, get on with it.
But other incidents, later this year, pointed to a collusion between UK and the USA. The accusations (again, in the trade press) say that UK authorities benefit from some info given by NSA in exchange of allowing the Agency to conduct ELINT (Electronic Intellingence) operations from the UK. But the Britisk go Dutch with US tips, if I may say so: The UK don't share the info, and use it strictly for their national interest. Including against the interest of other nations from this European Community they pretend to belong.
So let's sum this up.
The US ELINT helps US defense contractors. What else is new?
UK acts as a Yankee Trojan horse. Like it was the first time they're caught in the act.
French gummint complains while doing the same. And to make sure they can eavesdrop, they outlawed strong crypto in France! (But they promise a crypto policy change recently. We'll see.)
The Internet uncrypted (or 40-bit crypted) has long had the privacy of a postcard. The really unsettling thing is that GSM phones are routinely tapped. It's not unexpected, but from a legal point of view, this is probably a no-no.
Slashdot Mirror
The best way to monitor this flare is to go to http://www.sel.noaa.gov/rt_plots/pro_3d.html, which is the plot of proton flux measured by satellite GOES-8, averaged on a 5-minute period.
The 3 curves are the "event counts" for particles with an energy of at least 10, 50 and 100 MeV respectively. The curve has been leaping 4 orders of magnitude (10,000-fold) in the last 24-hours. Quite a nice flare.
If you have the dubious privilege of working at a large helpdesk, it would be interesting to see if the number of computer crashes actually increases. Modern, ultra-dense DRAM chips are requiring only minute energies to flip a bit, and this flare should provide more than enough SEUs (single-event upsets), even at sea level, to trigger random bitflips all over the world.
Anyone cares to provide empirical stats?
Sysadms who are in the process of a corporate deployment of Windows 2000 need not answer: We know you'll see plenty of random crashes :-).
It's interesting to note that these events (the July 13 2000 mega-flare and this one) happened during a solar maximum, i.e., the peak of a 11-year solar cycle.
There is a nice explanation with graphics here: http://www.windows.ucar.edu/cgi-bin/tour.cgi?link= /sun/activity/solar_cycle.html&sw=false&sn=872223& d=/sun/activity
Note that in spite of documented variations (e.g. the "Maunder Minimum" from 1650 to 1700, where cold climate coincided with very low solar spot counts), solar emissions are assumed to be constant in numerical climate simulation models. Which explains why these simulations are not exactly accurate.
Washington (Rooters): In a bold move to preserve the American way of life, Senator Howlers introduced a bill that would outlaw most chocolates, including Lindt and Nestle.
Howlers explained that this was an emergency bill: "These brands of food are unsafe. They generate a rush of sugar that is demonstrably dangerous. Hords of teens running on sugar high regularly go online and hack into National Defense computers."
Moreover, Howlers said that many popular brands of gourmet chocolate had a suspiciously foreign origin: "Many people start swapping slabs of high-cocoa chocolate in school, and import these foods from nations connected to Bin Laden's network. Do you know where most of these chocolates come from? Switzerland and France. There are several Middle East banks in the center of Geneva, I've seen pictures, they must be up to something. As for the French, they are plotting against us since they started selling these goddamn Airbus instead of buying good old Boeings. And my good friends in Avon even told me the French have the brazen gall of competing against them in the cosmetics sector. These evil acts cannot remain unpunished. From lipstick to dynamite stick, there is a clear path of potential terror here."
Howlers does not stop here in his sacred mission of protecting the American public. "Every scientist will tell you that this chocolate thing is addictive," he adds. "You start with Nestle, and soon you're hooked on 70-percent cocoa Lindt. From there the victim is sucked into an inferno of dark-stained teeth and smeared fingers. Plus, the farts are really unbearable."
Our valliant lawmaker has a solution to replace the imported food. "Cat food sandwich. That's right. Toast some bead, pop a can open, and here you go, have a delicious sandwich made of all-american poultry, beef or fish offals. It's not addictive, it does not give you a high, it does not worsen the trade deficit, and it doesn't stain clothes. Gourmets even eat it with a spoon out of the can."
Asked if it would not restrict basic freedoms, Howlers drove the point home: "We are compelled to protect the American way of life. If it's good enough for our pets, it's good enough for the rest of us. The catastrophe of September 11 clearly gives us the moral duty of getting rid of our complacency, even if we have to face a few inconvenience. I agree that popping open a can of Purina is harder than ripping up a Hershley pack. But we'll work on this issue."
-- Grovell Brownose, Washington, for Rooters
I know that the comparison goes only that far, but if the gas utility company gets a few reports that there is a gas odor floating around your house, they'll immediately shut down your gas meter. Then, maybe, they'll try to call you. More likely, they'll wait for you to call.
This is considered as a commendable attitude. Safety first. The utility doesn't want other customers to have problems because you are clueless about your gas heater's pilot light.
The real question is: do we want utility companies to refuse to sell us gas until we have passed a HVAC professional certification and are demonstrably competent fixing all gas-burning appliances problem? Of couse not. So by default we accept to be considered morons and to be shut off at the first alert.
Similarly, should ISP mandate system administration training for their $14.99 a month customers? Nope, they shut them off.
And honestly, I prefer to be assumed uncompetent rather than to have countless organization monitor my skills, training and job history.
In my not so humble opinion, all we'll see at first when the Earth Sim is fired up is that the best climate evolution models are awfully wrong. The nice thing about this machine is that it's powerful enough to run a large number of model variations and see how they produce the expected result. But the researchers will follow this time-honored pattern of numerical simulation:
The problem is that every of these steps is hard. Step 1 requires a very accurate, very fine-grained depiction of initial parameters. Even today, we just don't have that! In meteorological (weather forecast) computing, the initial condition matrix is created by complex non-linear interpolations from a limited set of observations that also are not all collected at the same point in time. Creation of this initial condition data set takes actually longer than the weather forecast run! This is a major hurdle. Now, can you guess how such a data set would be prepared for, say, year 1800, where weather stations were rether scarce? Yep, that's right, by guessing. Which means the very accurate computations will be based on very rough guesses. Discutable results at best.
Then, the "apply model" run. Hah. Our climate models are, to say the least, inaccurate. We don't understand the physics of climate yet. Also, we assume some things like "the solar constant", which says that the amount of energy coming from the sun is constant. It's not. You have variations on an 11-year cycle (solar spots) and a bigger variation on a 208-year period. Oh, not much, it varies by less than a percent. But it's enough to strongly affect the climate. See paper "Solar Forcing of Drought Frequency in the Maya Lowlands" in Science of 18 May 2001 to see how this solar oscillation wreaked havoc in the Maya civilization. And last time I checked, this phenomenon was not taken in account by standard climate models.
Step 3 is easy... if you're comparing your results with modern-era climate. But if you are running a simulation on the evolution of an ice-age 120,000 years ago, it's pretty hard to check the result's accuracy.
Step 4 requires more money. And that's where the current hype about climate change and warming was useful for scientists (and not just for companies who market costly, unsafe replacements for the cheap, inert, non-toxic, banned freon). Climatologists have finally been able to get big funding in some places, instead of being an arcane, underpowered science.
The cautious ./er will remember, if he's old enough, that during the Seventies, the "experts" warned us about the upcoming ice-age. I remember reading sci-fi books about state-cities trapped in underground caves below the 2-mil thick ice and fighting each other for proteins and uranium fuel... The same experts now warn us about the upcoming warming. When should we believe them?
My point exactly. Of course, total security is a fallacy, but using a system or a method that is demonstrably risky is plain dumb.
So yes, corporate IS departments keep installing Windows all over the place even in places where they could avoid it because "that's what the market is".
Imagine this discussion:
Of course, at the end the landlord shoots the architect, to the acclaim of the whole profession.
So why do we endure these IS "architects"?
One would hope that the numerous bugs and securities loopholes in Windows, and their exploits by Windows worms, would be a wake up call for Corporate IS managers all over the world. Time to sanitize and secure the computing environment, right?
Hah.
Actually, in spite of the huge annoyance caused by these worms, the IS in my Big Company did not bulge. Windows 2000 it is, Linux is for techies, no plan change. A timid note has been sent around saying that IIS servers should be checked against infection... of Code Red. How timely.
I guess the disaster recovery plan of these people still involves some backup server located in the WTC.
For the sake of future air travellers, I hope that we take airport security more seriously than computer security.
Who needs Ben Laden when you have Bill Gates to sabotage the Western world? :-)
Maybe Israel will reconsider its policy in the Middle-East. Maybe they'll allow a Palestinian state to be created. Maybe they'll reconsider a policy of targeted elimination that has been creating martyrs and orphans willing to die by the truckload.
Or maybe they'll decide to solve the Palestinian problem the way the early Americans solved the Ameridian problem.
Maybe we'll all get along together some day.
Maybe.
Meanwhile, we'll need to secure our airports. It means that we'll need to prevent weapons from being smuggled on-board and be used by terrorists.
Now, I have read reports saying that the terrorists threatened pilots with knives. It seems a pretty unreliable means to curb pilots and attendants into submission. Assume the knife reports are true. It is then likely that the terrorists threatened only one person at a time and prevented the other flight personnels to attack them by pretending they would detonate explosives.
So Western airports still need to insure that firearms and explosives cannot be sneaked into planes. That's very hard with current X-Ray and magnetic detection technology.
Handguns made mostly out of non-metallic synthetic materials are now available (I checked the Heckler und Koch web site but couldn't find a link to their rumored plastic HK-9). The only metallic part is the recoil spring. Even bullets can be made of hard plastic and still be lethal even if they have no great penetration power.
But the one thing that cannot be replaced is the nitrogen-based propulsive powder in the cartridges. The same is true for explosives: barring exotic, unstable compounds, all military and construction explosives use nitrogen-based molecules. The three bondings of nitrogen release a high energy when broken and are the staple of explosives.
That's where detection methods offer hope. Various technologies (neutrography and variants of MRI) could be used to build machines that detect 100% of known explosives in all luggage, as well as explosives and ammo carried or swallowed by passengers.
The real problems would be the following:
If the answer to a single one of these question is no, then forget all pretense of ever securing airports. Be ready to install anti-aircraft batteries around each city and accept the occasional accidental shooting of a misguided aircraft...
So doesn't it make sense?
As for whether or not this is a "problem": let people do as they please with their money, as long as they don't harm other people.
Thanks for the explanation. I know that some modern compilers include runtime feedback to reoptimize the code as more profiling data points are collected. But I am not aware that these optimizations are available in the IA-64 compilers. A cursory check of Intel's website did not reveal anything conclusive.
HP might make them available for the IA-64 line, but their R&D is now in considerable turmoil due to the acquisition of Compaq whose own R&D dept will have to be integrated with HP's, forcing a major reorg. So I'll not bet on anything smart coming from this side of HP for a few months.
Can someone point to an announcement or paper showing that IA-64 compilers are using or will use that kind of dynamic optimization?
There is actually a way to soften the sonic boom by lenghtnening the plane.
What makes a sharp sonic boom is the dissipation of a lot of energy over a small distance. You can't do much to lower the energy of a plane's shockwave when it reaches Mach 1, but you can expand the area over which that energy will be concentrated. This is done by lenghtening the cone-shaped high-pressure shockwave that surrounds the plane.
This way, the shockwave's pressure gradient is spread over a longer surface (roughly a cone starting from the tip of the plane), and thus, with the same pressure difference over a bigger distance, the gradient is lower.
The sonic boom's enery is the same, but since it's spread over a longer distance and hence a longer time, it gives less instantaneous power. So you have a flattened pulse that is theoretically muffled, instead of a sharp spike. (If you want to visualize the concept, burn a candle, then explode a hand grenade. See, the total energy was roughly the same, but the grenade produced it in a sharp spike.)
The resulting experimental plane looks like the old supersonic fighters of the 60's, with a cone tip that looks way too long for modern standards.
There was an article about this in Aviation Week but their web site is subscribers only.
It's a good question, and the answer is "roughly c/3". But it's not the whole picture.
Signal propagation in chips is not limited just by the speed of light. You have leaks due to line capacitance, which also induces coupling (crosstalk) between adjacent lines. If you send a nice square pulse on a 3-mm long straight metal line crossing half a chip (I've seen it!) you'll get an ugly, slow-rising pulse full of parasites picked by crosstalk on its way. And, oh, it will also bounce so badly that you better be prepared to sustain NEGATIVE voltages.
Want more fun? Get a 500-MHz signal on a metal line, and have the line do a sharp 90-degree turn. Everything then happens as if most electrons you send miss the turn and keep moving on their trajectory as bullets from a railgun. Not only will your signal be badly attenuated, it will also induce a crazy crosstalk in anything near that 90-degree corner.
See why chip designers become crazy? Sometimes you wonder how something as simple as an electron can be such a devious little bastard. :-)
Excellent point. The propagation delays are now about 50-70% of the clock cycle of a modern digital chip at the current speeds of several hundred MHz.
So any improvement of the semiconductor commutation speed is just a "nice to have" technology these days. Think of it. Assume that your chip spends 70% of its time waiting for signal propagation. Even if you suddenly get your transistors to switch instantly (that is, infinitely fast), you'll only increase the speed of a cycle by 100/70 = 1.43, or 43%. And then no more improvements.
That's why the biggest performance increases will now come from breakthrough in signal propagation speed: Copper wires, low-K dielectric, and more layers for denser circuits.
There is a famous naysayer who pretends that IA-64 is doomed to be an underperformer. The problem with this naysayer is:
His name is Alan Turing.
I'll shamelessly quote myself here. Here's an excerpt of an article
in The Register in which I said:
I'd gladly be proved wrong. Can someone please tell me why Turing
is wrong and Intel right? Or is Intel fighting an uphill battle
against Uncle Alan's laws?
Funny how some old problems keep coming back to haunt in in microelectronics. During the '80s, the static discharge problem was a big, bad, recognized problems. I remember cringing at the area "wasted" by ESD diods protecting the I/Os of 4-bit microcontrollers. (What do you mean, I am old? Beware of my cane, young fool!)
Then ESD prevention became part of the run-of-the-mill process, and not much attention was paid to it anymore. From time to time, though, a grim-faced test engineer showed up with a microphotography of a (relatively) huge hole in a faulty chip analyzed for default characterization, and asked for some extra grounding to be added on a new wafer manipulation station. But that was about it.
Now the problem is back again. What happened?! Well, the ESD absorbtion device don't shrink very well. So smaller chips with huge I/O counts mean that the chip real estate occupied by ESD prevention is a major nuisance now, and then there is the issue of the ever-decreasing geometry size while the static voltage are remaining constant.
So Moore's law makes the problem worse, not better. Now add the packaging of consumer device, which is increasingly shoddy (whatever happened to metal shields inside consumer devices?). Maybe someday we'll have to be as cautious around our consumer electronics as we once were around a memory expansion board.
#include <memories.h>: Once I was working in a customer's building where a programming lab had been hastily installed. A synthetic carpet had been laid over the old hardwood floor. The old heaters were dessicating the air so much our lips hurt. Enter a young, skinny woman wearing three layers of acrylic sweaters, as well as hose and plastic-sole sneakers. She reached down to insert a diskette into the Unix server. We all heard an audible crack when a 10-inch long spark jumped from her hand to the keyswitch. She yelped. We moaned: the server has crashed. Postmortem revealed that the processor detected an ECC failure during memory access. So the massive ESD had scrambled the bus. But it restarted OK.
Ground-strap these skinny girls during the winter!
--SysKoll
When they removed the vac and restarted the UPS, all the AIX machines came up flawlessly, no lost file, no corrupted file system, no nothing, thanks to the JFS. The engineers had lost only the work done since the last autosave. Oh, and they bought a broom for that lab.
Drawback: The very concept of SMIT requires to override the basic Unix principle of configuration files. The files are modified by SMIT to reflect the changes in the OMD, an object-oriented configuration database. If you manually edit the files, the OMD will override these changes.
If IBM is serious about Linux replacing AIX, they'll port SMIT. Encouragingly, they already ported JFS and open-sourced it. Meanwhile, Linux could use the on-the-fly extensibility.
-- SysKoll
There are two separate issues in your question.
I ran into the same problem a few years ago for documents produced by various word processors. I was the tech lead (translate: responsability without the pay) of a small team. We had documents coming from a variety of sources, and we were using RCS, which is the underlying mechanism for CVS, rather than CVS per se.
When we had a "foreign" document landing in our e-mail, our solution for keeping track of it was to imbed an RCS identification string ("$Id$") in that document. Some document format supported comment (invisible) fields, which was nice. Otherwise, we had to use some "invisible" string, such as a 1-pt header on a page. That worked for RTF documents as well as some weird formats such as Quark XPress, and even a PostScript file from the guy doing the cover of the manual on a Mac. That's because these formats are basically text.
Thing are more complicated when you get binary formats such as some MS Office native format docs. Assume you cannot reject the doc and require an RTF version (that is covered by the previous case). Then you need to set up a script that converts the binary document into Base64, slaps an $Id$ field in it and check it into your repository. Conversely, a check out requires you to remove the Id line and convert the Base64-encoded text file back into binary. I'd gladly cut-and-paste the 10-line Ksh code, but our lawyers want us to go through our "open-sourcing software committee" first. :-) You can automate the
process within the CVS server.
I had to teach my team to use RCS. Since then, cool GUI programs appeared, such as WinCVS (Check http://sourceforge.net/projects/cvsgui/. The site www.wincvs.org wasn't responding when I wrote this.) This is a GUI program that allows even an accountant to use a CVS server with a minimum of hand-holding. Give it a try.
Good luck.
- - SysKoll
Unless you think that ./ers don't care about telecom tapping laws?
Very interesting comment. You said you were adding CALEA to a cell phone network. Unless I am mistaken, this is a federal-mandated packet-level tapping that allows law enforcement authority to copy all packets going through a certain telecom operator and have them forwarded to the comfort and safety of their offices, without even having to go put a tape in a recorder. Is that right?
Now, can you please tell us how widely CALEA is deployed? Also, is the access to the tapping function well secured? Or can any cop click on a mouse and listen to anyone?
while(feds == involved)
{
paranoia++;
}
--SysKoll
Advantages:
Drawbacks
A often-quoted great app is the head-up display for cars: a transparent set of electonic circuits that you glue on your windshield and contains its own display. UV protection films are mandatory for keeping the circuits from burning in the summer, but it looks feasable and cheaper than the usual optical projection solutions.
Don't sell that $12 million 193-nm optical stepper in your silicon fab, though. We're not there yet, especially for medium or high speed circuits.
I heard on the radio that some newsblabbers were warning against the "dangers" of nuclear power generation. Well, sure, Chernobyl and stuff.
But nobody considers the dangers of thermal power plants. A few years ago, a huge fire started at a French refinery in a heavy oil storage tank. (Heavy oil is the very dense oil that you burn in oil-power thermal plants). Six workers died. Huge pollution. Also, last year, France suffered from a major marine pollution when a tanker loaded with heavy oils, apparently destined to yet another thermal power plant, broke in a storm. All beaches on the Northern Atlantic front were slick with oil.
As for natural gas plants, there are major explosions during natural gas transports (trains and trucks mainly) every year. It is reasonable to assume a good percentage of these transports are destined to butane-propane thermal plants.
It would be interesting to find statistics about accidents in the oil refinery and transport industry, and correlate it with the percentage of this oil consumed by thermal power plants. This would put the nuclear power risks in perspective.
Well, as a French guy, I can assure you that the inheritance tax in most european countries is absolutely staggering. In France, it's 33% (yep, one third). Inherit a $90,000 appartment? You owe the taxman a cool $30,000 plus various notarial fees (for appraisal). Generally, you end up selling it at a fraction of its value. No buyer? No big deal, the State just confiscate it.
So, According to Mr. Brin's reasoning, this ought to be a mighty powerful incentive for charity, right? Wrong: Charity donations per inhabitant in Europe are well below the US level, even after adjustment for GNP ratio.
The real incentive of the massive US donations seems different. It might be that the European non-gouvernmental charities are lobbying for subsides and are getting it from governments, and don't waste time on raising funds from individuals. It might also be a different tax dedu ction structure, which makes tax-lowering through donations much more efficient in the US than in Europe.
So I am afraid that Brin's whole line of reasoning is built on faulty assumptions and faulty data.
Disclaimer: I don't vote in the US, obviously, but I hate to see a "scientist" throw hogwash to defend a political agenda.
--SysKoll
P.S. Also,we all know that Hemos is a frippin' liberal already, don't we :-) ? So this feature is pretty useless.
This problem is the size of the photosensitive compound molecule. Whatever the wavelenght you use, you have to impress a photosensitive resin with your ever-finer optical patterns. And the problem is that this molecule is big. We are already reaching a point where the size of the photoresist molecule is not negligeable anymore.
In a few years, at around 0.02 microns, we'll reach the operational size of the smallest photoresist blob that can be physically impressed with a photon. So even if the wavalength keeps decreasing, we'll still have that blob size as the choke point.
Moreover, the new photoresists for 0.113-micrometer laser are far from being perfect. They are still way too temperamental for production use. And nobody has anything better coming up. None. No plans, no projects, no announcements.
Isn't that sad? For all the marvelous optical tricks that we pull in the micro-electronics industry, we are now roadblocked by a basic chemistry problem. Photoresist used to be a glorified paint job on top of a wafer that everyone was taking for granted, but it's back with a vengeance.
Conclusion: Unless we have a breakthrough in chemistry (not laser, not optics), the Moore law is dead when we reach 0.02 micron.
Really check time. Let's take a look at a few past cases that were much, MUCH worse than MS's mere competition infringement. For instance, the contaminated blood affair. In a nutshell, France's official Blood Transfusion organization has collected blood in prisons (with a high percentage of seropositive and hepatitis-carrying drug addicts among donors), then batched the blood and extracted anticoagulant factors that were then transfused to haemophilic patients. The alarms from doctors were ignored, and the French gummint refused to authorize the American HIV test methods and waited almost a year for a French test to be perfected.
Result: France has now the lower percentage of haemophilia cases in the Western world, due to half of the patients dying from AIDS. This is the most efficient DNA-screening plan the world has ever seen.
The investigation revealed it all. The High Special Court was assembled for the first time ever to try the ministers and officials who covered this massive killing. The court sanction was severe: a blame for the culprits. I kid you not.
And that was for killing 1200 people. Of course, the perpetrators had the right connections, and they deposited some money into the adequate Socialist political funds.
So I'm sure that Bill Gates is very frightened of being blamed. If he's clever, he will make a fat campaign contribution for Jospin, the Socialist prime minister, and the whole affair will be forgotten.
Quit dreaming, people, if my country had some remnant of decency among its officials, I'd know it. Microsoft will certainly bribe its way out of this minor problem, with little or no damage. I'm not suggesting this is a planned extorsion setup, but you get the idea.
Reread Ayn Rand for a detailed description of said extorsion mechanism. And sorry for raining on your parade, kids.
--SysKoll
The story about Echelon intercepting communications hit the intelligence community (and the electronic trade press) in France last year. So this isn't news, merely a report about old news.
The story started when Airbus lost a bid against Boeing in a very humiliating way. Boeing's price proposal was changed at the last minute and the new price was about 1 percent below the Airbus price. Other "miraculous" coincidences occured and rigged the game in Boeing's favor. Such uncanny timing and accuracy raised questions, and the Airbus executives wondered if their meeting rooms hadn't been bugged. An extensive investigation followed (we're talking about a bid of several billions US dollars here, pals.)
After a while, the results of the investigations leaked to the press. No Airbus exec had been bribed by Boeing, no phone tap nor bug was found. The only unsecure conversation between Airbus executives (about the bid) took place on GSM cellular phones. And GSM was though to be secure, except from the Echelon network.
So the conclusion was that Boeing was given access to GSM phone conversations tapped by Echelon in order for Boeing to win the bid. Since Boeing is a major taxpayer and the only remaining fighter jet maker, this makes sense from a US security point of view. Not very fair, but logical.
So far, only naive jerks would complain. This is competition, get on with it.
But other incidents, later this year, pointed to a collusion between UK and the USA. The accusations (again, in the trade press) say that UK authorities benefit from some info given by NSA in exchange of allowing the Agency to conduct ELINT (Electronic Intellingence) operations from the UK. But the Britisk go Dutch with US tips, if I may say so: The UK don't share the info, and use it strictly for their national interest. Including against the interest of other nations from this European Community they pretend to belong.
So let's sum this up.
The Internet uncrypted (or 40-bit crypted) has long had the privacy of a postcard. The really unsettling thing is that GSM phones are routinely tapped. It's not unexpected, but from a legal point of view, this is probably a no-no.