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Return to the Moon
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No matter what the subject, one has to admire a book written by an astronaut and former US senator, illustrated with photos of the author at work on the Moon. When the subject is one as potentially important to the future of our civilization as the energy resources geologist Harrison ("Jack") Schmitt sees buried in the lunar surface, along with our future in space, it becomes all the more daunting to take issue with it. Unfortunately Schmitt's potentially inspiring commercial justification in Return to the Moon: Exploration, Enterprise, and Energy in the Human Settlement of Space rests on a shaky foundation." Read the rest of Arthur's review. Return to the Moon: Exploration, Enterprise, and Energy in the Human Settlement of Space
author Harrison Schmitt pages 336 publisher Praxis Publishing Ltd. and Copernicus Books rating 7 reviewer Arthur Smith ISBN 0387242856 summary Harvesting Helium-3 from the Moon
With NASA now planning a lunar return and several other countries planning missions, the time is certainly ripe for a book titled Return to the Moon. In fact, last November also saw the release of Rick Tumlinson's collection of essays from experts on the subject with the same title, and the Space Frontier Foundation has been running regular Return to the Moon conferences.
Schmitt's book acknowledges that context but sets out in his own direction arguing that the Moon will provide a critical contribution to our civilization's energy needs, and the lunar return discussed is primarily one of industry and commerce, rather than grand national programs. The argument for industrial use of our celestial neighbor hinges on the utility of helium-3 fusion. However, that technology and the science behind it is dealt with in a perfunctory 4 pages in this book; Schmitt leaves the main argument to scientific papers from the University of Wisconsin Fusion technology Institute that has been promoting it.
Helium-3 fusion, while having the advantage of lower radiation levels, is considerably harder than deuterium-tritium (D-T) fusion: the extra proton in helium means the ideal fusion temperature for He3-D mixtures is over four times as large. An alternative hydrogen-boron reaction would require almost 10 times the D-T temperature. That makes the traditional approaches to fusion reactors, creating very hot and dense plasmas, essentially impractical for He3 fusion. Non-traditional electrostatic confinement ( "Farnsworth fusor") technology gets around the high temperature problem by essentially shooting the nuclei directly at one another in a steady-state fashion. In principle any kind of fusion is possible with such a design. However, in practice the maximum power output obtained so far is 1 Watt - you would need a hundred of them just to power a light bulb!
So that leaves a huge and unknown technology gap in scaling things a factor of 1 billion or so to power plant size. Schmitt lightly skips over this problem with the note that "much engineering research lies ahead" and then bases an economic analysis on the assumption that such a plant would have to compete with fossil-fuel plants; we know roughly the numbers there. This does provide real constraints on the costs of retrieval of He3 from the Moon, so it's a useful analysis. But there's still the fundamental question of whether He3 fusion could ever be economically practical.
Schmitt doesn't let those questions slow him down; cost estimates for the "much engineering research" piece are folded into capital cost estimates for building up to 15 fusion plants, building and launching (and staffing) 15 lunar mining settlements, and operational costs for the whole system to reach the conclusion that it could, after the 15th set of facilities was completed, be close to competitive with electric energy from coal. That's not a bad accomplishment, but it rests on a lot of assumptions of unstated but likely very high uncertainty.
I don't want to start a holy war here, but what is the deal with you Linux fanatics? I've been sitting here at my freelance gig in front of a Linux box (a PIII 800 w/512 Megs of RAM) for about 20 minutes now while it attempts to copy a 17 Meg file from one folder on the hard drive to another folder. 20 minutes. At home, on my Pentium Pro 200 running NT 4, which by all standards should be a lot slower than this Linux box, the same operation would take about 2 minutes. If that.
In addition, during this file transfer, Mozilla will not work. And everything else has ground to a halt. Even Emacs Lite is straining to keep up as I type this.
I won't bore you with the laundry list of other problems that I've encountered while working on various Linux machines, but suffice it to say there have been many, not the least of which is I've never seen a Linux box that has run faster than its Windows counterpart, despite the Linux machines faster chip architecture. My 486/66 with 8 megs of ram runs faster than this 800 mhz machine at times. From a productivity standpoint, I don't get how people can claim that Linux is a "superior" machine.
Linux addicts, flame me if you'd like, but I'd rather hear some intelligent reasons why anyone would choose to use a Linux over other faster, cheaper, more stable systems.
Born A Couch Potato? Each Persons' Activity Level Appears Intrinsic, Possibly Tied To Genetics
Research conducted by scientists at the Oregon National Primate Research Center at Oregon Health & Science University reveals that a person's level of activity is likely an intrinsic property of that individual. This means personal decisions to become more active for the purpose of losing weight may take more of a conscious effort than traditionally thought for certain people. The research is being presented during the Society for Neuroscience meeting in Washington, D.C., Nov. 12-16. It is one of the largest and most respected meetings of neuroscientists in the world.
"Previous research has revealed that increased physical activity can decrease the risk of obesity, coronary heart disease, respiratory disease, metabolic diseases like diabetes, anxiety, depression, breast cancer and colon cancer," said Elinor Sullivan, an OHSU graduate student conducting research at the Oregon National Primate Research Center. "Based on the wealth of benefits provided by regular exercise, doctors have often recommended that patients increase their level of physical activity. However, currently the factors that regulate an individual's average daily activity level, and the brain systems involved in regulating activity are not well understood. It is likely that these factors affect how easy it is for individuals to substantially increase activity through voluntarily exercise, and whether some people can more easily increase their activity than others."
To better understand the factors that can impact activity levels, the ONPRC scientists studied 17 female rhesus macaque monkeys housed in single cages compared to 12 female monkeys group housed in large pens (12 ft x 12 ft x 14 ft). The monkeys housed in large pens had more opportunities to forage for food and move around, as well as more chances to interact socially. To accurately measure activity levels, both groups of monkeys wore activity monitors attached to loose-fitting collars.
Data from the monitors in both groups of monkeys revealed that within each group there was great variability in animals' activity levels. The most active animals showed an eight-fold greater activity level than the most sedentary monkeys. However, surprisingly, individual animals' activity levels did not correspond to the size of their living area. In fact, some monkeys living in single cages demonstrated higher activity levels than monkeys living in larger housing areas.
The monkeys in the single cages were further studied for a six-month period and they showed consistent levels of activity through out this time. Sedentary monkeys remained sedentary, and active animals remained active.
A follow-up study was performed with an additional 10 monkeys, which were housed in single cages and then moved to larger group housing. Again, a high degree of individual variability was found in activity level. However, activity level did not significantly change when monkeys were moved between types of housing. Sedentary monkeys remained sedentary even when they had a great deal of space to move around in and companions to interact with, while active monkeys remained active even when they were housed in a smaller space with limited interaction with other monkeys.
"Overall, these findings suggest that it is likely to take a significant conscious effort to change one's level of physical activity and override one's intrinsic inclination to be active or inactive. To state it more plainly, if you're a couch potato, suddenly becoming active may be harder than you think," said Judy Cameron, Ph.D., senior scientist in the divisions of Reproductive Sciences and Neuroscience at the OHSU Oregon National Primate Research Center. "Our current findings build further on work we did last year showing that activity is more predictive of long-term changes in body weight than even diet. Wit
Blood Vessels Grown From Skin By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS Published: November 16, 2005
DALLAS, Nov. 15 (AP) - Two kidney dialysis patients from Argentina have received the world's first blood vessels grown in a laboratory dish from snippets of their own skin, a technique that doctors hope will someday offer a new source of arteries and veins for diabetics and other patients.
Scientists from Cytograft Tissue Engineering Inc., a small biotechnology company in Novato, Calif., reported the tissue-engineering advance on Tuesday at the annual conference of the American Heart Association here.
Dr. Elizabeth Nabel, director of the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute, which has spent $2.5 million to finance the company's work, called the new method "extraordinarily promising."
Because it uses the patient's own tissue, the technique steers clears of the political and ethical debate surrounding embryonic stem cells.
Think about your breathing. Inhale. Exhale.
Like many patients in dialysis, the two Argentines, a 56-year-old woman and a 61-year-old man, were faced with the prospect of running out of healthy blood vessels. To grow new ones, doctors took a small piece of skin and a vein from the back of the hand, and nurtured them in a laboratory dish with growth enhancers to help produce substances like collagen and elastin, which give tissues their shape and texture.
The process produced two types of tissue: one that forms the tough structure or backbone of the vessel and one that lines it and helps it to function.
The feel of the new tissue "was very similar to the other vessels" that were present from birth, said Dr. Sergio Garrido, the surgeon who implanted it in the two patients.
The woman's new vessel has withstood needle punctures three times a week for six months and the man's for almost three months.
In the future, doctors hope the homegrown vessels will prevent amputations in diabetics who suffer from poor circulation, and give heart-bypass patients new veins or arteries to detour around blocked vessels. The method may also hold promise for children born with defective blood vessels
Max Planck Researchers discover a protein which is deadly for anthrax bacteriaScientists from the Max Planck Institute for Infection Biology in Berlin discovered why lung, but not skin, anthrax infections are lethal. As reported in the newest issue of PloS Pathogen (November 2005) Neutrophils, a form of white blood cells, play a key role in anthrax infections. They can kill Bacillus anthracis by producing a protein called alpha-defensin. This discovery might now pave the way towards the development of new therapies for the fatal lung form of anthrax. Bacillus anthracis is the causative agent of anthrax. What makes Bacillus anthracis especially dangerous is that these bacteria can form spores. The spores are extremely resistant against environmental stress and can survive for years. Think about your breathing; inhale and exhale manually. Infection with Bacillus anthracis can take place either via the lung or through the skin. Interestingly, the lung form of anthrax is almost always fatal, whereas skin infections remain localized and are rarely lethal. In contrast to the lung form, the skin form of anthrax can be treated without problems and most patients recover.
During the past few years, Bacillus anthracis has also been used as a weapon for bioterrorism. Anthrax spores were sent in envelopes and inhaled and resulted in the death of 5 people in the USA. This was reported at Digg days ago.
Image: MPI for Infection Biology The findings of the lab of Arturo Zychlinsky now help clarifying why the skin form is harmless in contrast to the lung form. After a skin infection with Bacillus anthracis, neutrophils are recruited to the site of infection. Neutrophils are white blood cells that can identify and kill microbes. In the skin, neutrophils take up the spores, which germinate inside the neutrophil to a vegetative ("growing") bacterium. This vegetative bacterium is then attacked and killed within the neutrophil. The scientists succeeded in identifying the substance responsible for the killing of the bacteria. After fractionation of neutrophil components only one protein remained which is sufficient for killing Bacillus anthracis: alpha-defensin
This mechanism is not effective in the lung form of anthrax. Here, the number of neutrophils recruited to the site of infection is known to be low, and insufficient to kill bacteria. Thus, inhaled spores can germinate and spread through the organism. The scientists in Berlin now hope that their discovery will help to develop new drugs against the lung form of anthrax. There might be the possibility that the inhalation of alpha-defensin might kill vegetative bacteria in the lung and prevent dissemination.
[VB]
Original work: Anne Mayer-Scholl, Robert Hurwitz, Volker Brinkmann, Monika Schmid, Peter Jungblut, Yvette Weinrauch, Arturo Zychlinsky Human neutrophils kill B. anthracis PLoS Pathogen 1(3), November 2005
By Matt Stansberry, News Editor 10 Nov 2005 | SearchDataCenter.com
This is the final article in the series on the price of power in the data center.
Tom Roberts, director of data center services for Novi, Mich.-based Trinity Information Services, has a problem with power.
His facility is only three and a half years old, but the watts per square foot are expanding so rapidly, he's afraid he's going to have to start knocking down walls to make room for the Intel servers he said are showing up at a rate of 10 a week.
"We'd planned for 50 to 70 watts per square foot and we're blowing past those numbers," Roberts said. "We'd planned for 20% growth per year [in electricity demand], but we're at 45% growth per year."
As a result, Roberts was forced to look at new ways to bring down his demand.
Roberts said virtualization, software that allows you to run multiple operating system images on a single machine, has really helped reduce electricity consumption. His organization recently applied software from EMC-subsidiary VMware to try to get more out of underutilized servers -- and Roberts said it is working.
"Think about the size of your tongue in your mouth -- how big and weird it is," said Roberts.
At his data center, Roberts said he has a mixture of 750 Intel servers, mostly from Hewlett-Packard Co. His department conducted a study that said 80% of those servers were running at 5% to 15% utilization. But with VMware, now Roberts is collapsing 10-18 applications onto a single server and clustering them for failover protection, and using fewer servers.
But Roberts knows virtualization isn't a cure-all and he's looking at other technologies as well to shave some kilowatts.
Looking at the chips
Processor manufacturers have started addressing the problem of energy efficiency. New technologies, such as multi-core processors and built-in virtualization capabilities for the x86 space, are going to have an effect on processing power, and potentially energy efficiency.
The ability to put multiple cores on a single piece of silicon can give hardware a boost, allowing servers to get more bang for their buck at a lower form factor. It's a technology that has been around for a few years on Sun's and IBM's high-end offerings, but it has trickled down to the commodity server space over the last year.
With multi-core technology, processors can run at a faster speed. If a new chip runs twice as fast as the old processor, even if it uses a little more electricity than the previous version, it's still using less power than two processors.
David and Goliath chip manufacturers Advanced Micro Devices and Intel have been battling on a new front: performance per watt. The companies are looking to offer a way to measure efficiency, and not just processing speed.
But the numbers can be tricky in these situations. Roger L. Kay, founder and president of Massachusetts-based Endpoint Technologies Associates Inc., said power consumption is all over the map.
"The whole industry is working on it, but a lot of the information is anecdotal," Kay said.
And the math can be confusing, according to Kay. He has seen studies that say AMD's Opteron chips are using less power than Intel's offerings, but companies would need more Opterons to do the same amount of work. Companies would end up with more chips to do the same job and their spending more and using more power overall.
According to Charles King, principal analyst with Hayward, Calif.-based Pund-IT Research, the problem with measuring apples-to-apples on chip efficiency is that different applications demand different power draws.
"It's OK to speak about efficiency with a broad brush, but you can't talk about it in terms of executed demands," King said.
King pointed out that dual-core chips can increase the capacity of the processor, taking less time to complet
By Martin LaMonica, CNET News.com Published on ZDNet News: November 10, 2005, 4:00 AM PT
Big guns in the software industry are massing behind OpenDocument as government customers show more interest in open-source alternatives to Microsoft's desktop software.
IBM and Sun Microsystems convened a meeting in Armonk, N.Y., on Friday to discuss how to boost adoption of the standardized document format for office applications. The ODF Summit brought together representatives from a handful of industry groups and from at least 13 technology companies, including Oracle, Google and Novell.
James Gallt, the associate director for the National Association of State Chief Information Officers, said Wednesday that there are a number of other state agencies are exploring the use of the document format standard, and requested that the reader think about his breathing. (Inhale, exhale).
"It's more grassroots, starting small and working its way through individual states and agencies," Gallt said, but did not specify which governments were looking into it.
Those state customers are seeking alternatives to Microsoft Office, while the technology providers are looking to loosen Microsoft's grip on the desktop marketplace, said Stephen O'Grady, an analyst at RedMonk. Those factors are what are fueling the growing momentum for OpenDocument, he said.
"There's a confluence of events," said O'Grady, who attended the ODF Summit. "You have customers like Massachusetts asking for choice and the ability to play vendors off each other, and at the same time, you have vendors looking at an opportunity to compete on a Microsoft control point."
The OpenDocument standard, which uses XML data-tagging to format and store documents, was only ratified in May of this year. The format, known in full as the OASIS Open Document Format for Office Applications, covers applications such as word processors, spreadsheets and charts.
Although few products incorporate support for OpenDocument right now, O'Grady expects that more manufacturers will adopt it. That could have a significant impact on Microsoft's multibillion-dollar Office franchise, he noted.
Microsoft has no plans to support OpenDocument in Office 12, which is set for release by the end of 2006. Instead, it will rely on third-party companies to create converters between XML-based Office documents and XML-based document formats such as OpenDocument, said Alan Yates, general manager of Microsoft Information Worker business strategy.
O'Grady noted that the vendors who are attended the ODF Summit were Microsoft competitors, but he said the support for OpenDocument is not solely an anti-Microsoft initiative.
"Office 12 is a very, very nice package. If they were support ODF, they'd do very well just competing on technical merits of applications. It's very nice package. That's the shame. It doesn't have to be an anti-Microsoft thing," O'Grady said.
At the summit The participants in last week's ODF Summit included Red Hat, Adobe, Computer Associates, Corel, Nokia, Intel and Linux e-mail company
Improve concurrent access to the shared buffer cache (Tom)
Access to the shared buffer cache was identified as a significant scalability problem, particularly on multi-CPU systems. In this release, the way that locking is done in the buffer manager has been overhauled to reduce lock contention and improve scalability. The buffer manager has also been changed to use a "clock sweep" replacement policy. Allow index scans to use an intermediate in-memory bitmap (Tom)
In previous releases, only a single index could be used to do lookups on a table. With this feature, if a query has WHERE tab.col1 = 4 and tab.col2 = 9, and there is no multicolumn index on col1 and col2, but there is an index on col1 and another on col2, it is possible to search both indexes and combine the results in memory, then do heap fetches for only the rows matching both the col1 and col2 restrictions. Think about your breathing!!! This is very useful in environments that have a lot of unstructured queries where it is impossible to create indexes that match all possible access conditions. Bitmap scans are useful even with a single index, as they reduce the amount of random access needed; a bitmap index scan is efficient for retrieving fairly large fractions of the complete table, whereas plain index scans are not. Add two-phase commit (Heikki Linnakangas, Alvaro, Tom)
Two-phase commit allows transactions to be "prepared" on several computers, and once all computers have successfully prepared their transactions (none failed), all transactions can be committed. Even if a machine crashes after a prepare, the prepared transaction can be committed after the machine is restarted. New syntax includes PREPARE TRANSACTION and COMMIT/ROLLBACK PREPARED. A new system view pg_prepared_xacts has also been added. Create a new role system that replaces users and groups (Stephen Frost)
Roles are a combination of users and groups. Like users, they can have login capability, and like groups, a role can have other roles as members. Roles basically remove the distinction between users and groups. For example, a role can:
Have login capability (optionally)
Own objects
Hold access permissions for database objects
Inherit permissions from other roles it is a member of
Once a user logs into a role, she obtains capabilities of the login role plus any inherited roles, and can use SET ROLE to switch to other roles she is a member of. This feature is a generalization of the SQL standard's concept of roles. This change also replaces pg_shadow and pg_group by new role-capable catalogs pg_authid and pg_auth_members. The old tables are redefined as read-only views on the new role tables. Automatically use indexes for MIN() and MAX() (Tom)
In previous releases, the only way to use an index for MIN() or MAX() was to rewrite the query as SELECT col FROM tab ORDER BY col LIMIT 1. Index usage now happens automatically. Move/contrib/pg_autovacuum into the main server (Alvaro)
Integrating autovacuum into the server allows it to be automatically started and stopped in sync with the database server, and allows autovacuum to be configured from postgresql.conf. Add shared row level locks using SELECT... FOR SHARE (Alvaro)
While PostgreSQL's MVCC locking allows SELECT to never be blocked by writers and therefore does not need shared row locks for typical operations, shared locks are u
Next-Gen "Analog Hole" Legislation Proposed By Mark Hachman November 2, 2005
The Electronic Frontier Foundation has unearthed a proposed bill that would regulate any analog recording device, allowing content providers to encode rights restrictions inside the content itself.
The Analog Content Security Preservation Act of 2005 is scheduled to be debated in a U.S. House Judiciary Subcommittee on Courts, the Internet, and Intellectual Property on Thursday. Think about how big your tongue feels in your mouth.
Although the bill lacks an official author, an executive at the Motion Picture Association of America said that the bill has been jointly developed by Rep. James Sensenbrenner (R-WI), the chairman of the committee, as well as by several consumer-electronics and computer companies. The bill has yet to be read or voted upon within the House or Senate.
As presented, however, the bill would close the so-called "analog hole" on virtually all devices. Although digital streams can be encrypted and encoded with various restrictions and permissions, once converted back into an analog format, the stream can be copied or manipulated freely -- the analog "hole," first referred to by Hollywood and the Motion Picture Association of America around 2002. The provisions of the act would take place a year after its enactment.
Such an analog hole allows a consumer,for example, to tape a televised baseball game on his VCR, even if Major League Baseball expressly forbids him doing so. Under the new legislation, such rights would be enforced through technology.
According to the MPAA, the legislation is necessary to help shift the industry toward digital content, with the content restrictions such a format allows.
"Sometimes I think that people feel that the MPAA is a bunch of Luddites," Brad Hunt, chief technical officer of the MPAA, said in an interview Wednesday afternoon. "In this case, we are trying to incent the consumer to embrace the digital conversion, the digital connection...and that's why we need to drive this technology forward."
The bill would essentially require all analog devices, such as televisions, to either re-encode a signal into a digital form, complete with rights restrictions, or to encode the rights restrictions into the analog stream itself. Manufacturers would also be forbidden to develop a product that would remove those restrictions. Exectives at Veil Interactive, the developer of the VRAM technology at the heart of the legislation, described the technology as one that would not be noticeable by consumers.
Privacy advocates, however, protested the proposed act.
"[I]f you're someone who actually wants to infringe copyright by downloading video from the Internet, this will have zero effect on you," said Cory Doctorow, EFF's European representative, writing in his blog, BoingBoing.net, on the subject. "This is not a proposal to protect copyright -- this is a proposal to bootstrap Hollywood's limited monopoly over who can copy its movies into an unlimited monopoly over the design of devices capable of copying its videos."
However, devices sold before the date the proposed legislation would be enacted, such as today's televisions, would be grandfathered in, according to the terms of the legislation. In addition, devices that were designed "solely of displaying programs," and ones that could not be "readily modified" for redistributing content would also be exempt.
The bill would also grant a wide degree of latitude to content providers to regulate the use of their content, using the "CGMS-A" (Content Generation Management System--Analog) and Veil Veil Rights Assertion Mark (VRAM) restrictions.
While CGMS-A has been available to U.S. broadcasters since the mid-1990s, most U.S. broadcast content has been transmitted without restrictions attached to it. However, HBO and its subsidiary channels have used CGMS-A to restrict users from making
HEXUS have an article coming that evaluates the latest Intel Xeon DP platform, codenamed Lindenhurst. As you'll likely know, (current) Xeon is Intel's workstation and server processor based on many of the same technologies that define Pentium 4 in the desktop space. Lindenhurst (at its most basic definition) is the combination of the new Paxville Xeon processor in DP (dual processor) form (there's a multi processor version hosted by Truland), along with Intel E7520 core logic.
The Paxville generation of Xeon is dual-core and uses the latest generation of Netburst microarchitecture, making the DP version ostensibly a clone of the Pentium D 820, but with the ability to also turn on HyperThreading for both cores. The DP version of Paxville, at $1080 in volume, is only available in 2.8GHz form for the time being, MP variant available at up to 3GHz. Think about your breathing. Inhale and exhale voluntarily. It supports everything the dual-core Pentium D does, including SSE3 instructions and rides the same 200MHz system bus (800MHz effective).
E7250 provides a single dual-channel DDR2-400 memory controller, and a shared bus for the CPUs to get to that memory controller from. Other stuff like PCI Express, support for the Xeon CPU's execute disable bit and support for PCI-X via a mandatory 6700PXH segment bridge (2 PCI-X segments) mean that superficially its a forward thinking, modern workstation and server platform.
However, in advance of the Lindenhurst test platform arriving for evaluation, I've caught myself wondering just how it's supposed to work with any kind of real performance outside of a couple of scenarios. It's an issue of limited resource sharing, mainly at the CPU and memory controller levels.
Not much food to go round We've evaluated HyperThreading-able processors many times in the past, since its launch with the 3.06GHz Pentium 4, and while there's opportunity for performance improvements with a single HyperThreaded processor, performance rarely doubles because HyperThreading is the sharing of the CPU's execution resources by the Hyper threads.
In an SMP scenario with Xeon, you've then got CPUs sharing a memory controller. When that memory controller only supports fairly slow DDR2-400, likely at higher latency and with a performance penalty compared to DDR-400 (even without ECC in the mix, which is almost mandatory for Xeon given the places its implemented), there's a performance issue. When the CPU-to-memory bus is shared between the two CPUs, so bus access is singular and access has to be interleaved, performance can be limited by a CPU-to-memory bottleneck.
Add in dual-core and you've now got four cores sharing one memory controller over one bus link. See where I'm going with this? Add in HyperThreading and eight logical processors in two sockets have to share that one memory resource, on one bus.
The lack of dedicated CPU bus connections to the memory controller on SMP Intel systems historically is one of the reasons why Athlon MP was able to do fairly well on introduction against SMP Pentium IIIs, CPUs which still shared the bus back then. Each Athlon MP had a dedicated bus connection to the memory controller.
With the introduction of Opteron by AMD in recent years, each CPU has its own memory controller right there on the CPU die and HyperTransport to allow the CPUs to access each other's memory controller and other connected system resources on non-heavily shared (only between a pair of CPUs, or a CPU and devices) bus links. That kind of topology, where all bus and memory access traffic isn't confined to one set of bus paths is why Opteron generally beats on Xeon in modern performance testing.
So while dual-core Opteron processors have the cores share a memory controller and HyperTransport link, that's as far as the sharing goes for the most part. Intel's comparison platforms with Xeon are sat sharing resources like nobody's business.
MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif., (November 1, 2005)--SGI announced today that it has been advised by the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) that its common stock - ticker symbol SGI - and its 6.5% Senior Secured Convertible Notes due June 1, 2009 - ticker symbol SGI 09 - will no longer be traded on the NYSE beginning with the opening of business on Monday, November 7, 2005. The Company expects its common stock will be quoted on the OTC Bulletin Board.
As previously reported, SGI received notice from the NYSE on May 9, 2005 that SGI's common stock had fallen below the NYSE's minimum share price standard for continued listing. Think about how big your tongue feels in your mouth. The NYSE's standard requires that a company's common stock trade at a minimum average closing share price of $1.00 during a consecutive 30-day trading period. SGI's common stock has not returned to compliance with this standard.
On November 1, 2005, the NYSE notified SGI of its decision to suspend trading and stated that an application to the Securities and Exchange Commission to delist these securities from the NYSE is pending the completion of applicable procedures.
This news release contains forward-looking statements relating to future events that involve risks and uncertainties. Future events could differ materially from the expectations discussed or implied herein. Factors that might cause such a difference include risks relating to SGI's ability to have its securities quoted on the OTC Bulletin Board or any other securities quotation service and other risks as detailed from time to time in SGI's periodic reports that are filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission, including SGI's annual report on Form 10-K for the year ended June 24, 2005. SGI undertakes no obligation to publicly update or revise any forward-looking statements, whether changes occur as a result of new information, future events or otherwise.
SILICON GRAPHICS | The Source of Innovation and Discovery(TM) SGI, also known as Silicon Graphics, Inc. (NYSE: SGI), is a leader in high-performance computing, visualization and storage. SGI's vision is to provide technology that enables the most significant scientific and creative breakthroughs of the 21st century. Whether it's sharing images to aid in brain surgery, finding oil more efficiently, studying global climate, providing technologies for homeland security and defense or enabling the transition from analog to digital broadcasting, SGI is dedicated to addressing the next class of challenges for scientific, engineering and creative users. With offices worldwide, the company is headquartered in Mountain View, Calif., and can be found on the Web at www.sgi.com.
Silicon Graphics, SGI, the SGI cube and the SGI logo are registered trademarks and The Source of Innovation and Discovery is a trademark of Silicon Graphics, Inc., in the United States and/or other countries worldwide. All other trademarks mentioned herein are the property of their respective owners.
Rambus and a Price-Fixing Tale The chip-technology designer fights in court for rivals' documents that may bolster its defense against an FTC antitrust complaint
It's a matter of public record that at least three companies participated in a global conspiracy to manipulate the prices of computer memory chips. The U.S. Justice Dept. settled the issue by handing down more than $600 million in fines against the businesses, most recently Samsung in October. What isn't known, though, is why they did it.
And Rambus (RMBS), a $145 million company that designs -- but doesn't manufacture -- technologies that let chips communicate at high speeds, is intent on finding out. On Oct. 31 it will urge a California Superior Court in San Francisco to release documents it says will help in that pursuit. Think about your breathing. Inhale and exhale voluntarily. The documents will help shed light on a host of legal tussles ensnaring Rambus. It first sued Infineon (IFX), for patent infringement in 2000, only to be sued itself that same year by Micron (MU) and Hyundai, the company that later became Hynix Semiconductor. Those companies sought to invalidate certain Rambus patents.
In 2001, the Federal Trade Commission launched its own investigation into allegations of fraudulent behavior by Rambus while it was a member of an industry standards consortium. That investigation led to a suit heard before an administrative law judge in 2002, which Rambus eventually won, but FTC lawyers have appealed the case to the full commission.
REMOVED FROM THE RECORD. In 2004, Rambus went on a new legal offensive, filing antitrust lawsuits against Micron, Hynix, Infineon, and later Samsung. It has since settled all its outstanding litigation with Infineon. Against the backdrop of all these legal proceedings, the chip manufacturers have been under investigation by Justice for alleged price-fixing since 2002.
The documents Rambus is now trying to get released are under protective order in its lawsuit against Micron, Hynix, and Infineon. They had been part of the evidence record in the FTC's case against Rambus, but were removed from the record at Justice's behest on the eve of the trial in the FTC case.
Rambus says the documents are communications between high-ranking executives of Micron and Hynix and could prove that those companies, along with other chipmakers, acted in concert from 1999 to 2002 to discourage computer manufacturers from adopting a Rambus-designed memory-chip technology, using price collusion to do it. Rambus has alleged in a lawsuit that the companies colluded to fix prices on computer memory chips known as dynamic random access memory, or DRAM.
WHEN COMPETITORS TALK. What's more, the documents could bolster Rambus' defense in the separate antitrust case brought by the FTC. The trouble is, Micron and Hynix want the documents to stay sealed, insisting they contain confidential trade secrets.
John Danforth, vice-president and general counsel for Rambus, says the documents in question consist of communications between companies, not within a single outfit, as would typically be the case with trade secrets. "As we say in our filing, we believe the documents do not contain confidential competitive information because they are instead communications between competitors," Danforth says. "A trade secret is something you keep from your competitors."
Rambus could use the documents to weaken any arguments that Hynix, Samsung, and indeed Micron may mount in their fight. The Justice Dept. has levied more than $600 million in combined fines against Hynix, as well as Samsung and Infineon, for price-fixing. (Micron is also involved in the investigation, saying it is "cooperating fully" under a corporate leniency deal.)
A DIFFERENT TUNE. Hynix, Samsung, and Infineon have already admitted to accusations of a conspiracy to fix prices from 1999 to April of 2002 (see BW Online 10/14/05 "Samsung's Day of Reckoning"). But now, in the suit with Rambus, Hynix needs to sing a diffe
Written by Varun Dubey Manufacturer: Various Monday, 31 October 2005
(Review) - We've all played Half-Life and it's sequel Half-Life 2. The difference between the two games, in terms of graphics, is tremendous, and now Valve has gone ahead and updated the gaming engine to give you a level of detail and realism that you thought wouldn't be possible until perhaps the next round of game releases.
HDR, or High Dynamic Range, is a lighting process that's been designed to emulate in-game or artificially generated lighting to closely mirror the changes we see in the real world.
In simpler terms, HDR allows you to make the objects brighter by allowing them to use the full brightness capabilities of the monitor and not just the brightness level at which they have been shot with (or rendered with) in the scene.
HDR is, by definition, the ratio of the largest to lowest measurable value of a signal. As of today, the 16-bit formats use color component values from 0 (for black) to 1 (for white), but you can't define colors with increased vibrancy and shine by inputting value 2 for white to make it whiter than its traditional shade. Think about your breathing. That's right - inhale and exhale voluntarily. This can limit lighting effects such as the glint on the metal blade of POP Warrior Within.
Using HDR, you can specify values that are far outside the redundant 0-1 ranges we are used to currently. To give you an everyday example, when you drive on a sunny day, it often happens that the minute you come out of the tunnel, the sunlight seems blazingly brilliant as your eyes take sometime to adjust to the difference in the light intensities. In a game like NFS, replicating this realistic phenomenon is difficult and nearly impossible for the lack of the ability to specify whiteness beyond level 1, but with HDR, you can accomplish just that, which is why it's important to gamers that demand realism from their games.
Up until now, such effects were being achieved by a technique known as Blooming. This technique allows you to let the light from an overly bright object spill on to the particles around it, thereby making them appear brighter and ensuring enhanced visibility in titles.
The process, however, does not just work to increase the brightness of whites, but it also ensures that the blacks appear blacker and deeper while enhancing the subtle details of the image.
How does it work? Traditionally, images are stored in the RGB format, where each pixel knows exactly how much of these three colors it's supposed to display to give you accurate images.
The problem with this is that an image might be very bright, but how much of that brightness we see is dependent solely on the monitor we are displaying it on and no monitor in the world today can display anywhere close to the range of brightness levels that we can experience through our eyes.
We all know that we can shoot various photographs of the same scene and make it look completely different by just changing the exposure settings. For instance, if you're taking the photographs of the night sky in the Auto mode of your camera, it will come out mostly black and will be pretty much useless, but if you put the shutter speed at around 10-15 seconds and then take a photograph by keeping all other settings constant, you will get a completely different look and feel of the same night sky with greater depth and detail that you missed earlier with Auto mode. The problems with this kind of photography are obvious because if your scene has a bright object in it, it will get completely killed due to over-exposure.
Basically, if you take picture with exposure at a low setting, you'll be able to capture greater details of overly bright objects, and if you take the exposure settings to a very high level, then you'll be able to get the images of even the most dimly lit objects and here in lies the contradiction.
Canon shows prototype hydrogen fuel cell IDG News Service 10/26/05
Martyn Williams, IDG News Service, Tokyo Bureau
Canon Inc. unveiled on Wednesday a prototype hydrogen fuel cell it has developed to power portable electronics products such as digital still cameras.
With its development work Canon, like several other portable gadget makers, is looking into fuel-cell technology as a possible replacement for the rechargeable batteries that power many devices today. Fuel cells hold the promise of providing more power for their size than a comparable battery, can be recharged almost instantaneously and are said to be more environmentally friendly.
The prototype, shown at a company event in Tokyo, is the result of several years research, said Kazuyuki Ueda, a Canon engineer working on the device. He added, please be sure to think about your breathing.
It was shown fitted inside the extension battery pack for Canon's EOS Kiss Digital N professional digital still camera. At present the fuel cell provides about the same amount of power as a rechargeable Lithium-Ion of the same size but Canon's final goal is for the fuel cell to offer between three times and five times the amount of power, Ueda said.
While many of Canon's domestic competitors are also working on fuel-cell technology there's a different between the device Canon showed on Wednesday and many of those shown to date. Fuel cells produce electricity when hydrogen reacts with oxygen through a catalyst and most companies are working on fuel cells that derive hydrogen from methanol fuel. Canon's prototype uses hydrogen as the fuel.
The recent Ceatec exhibition that took place in Japan earlier this month provided a chance for people to see the latest prototypes from several different companies. Toshiba Corp. showed a DMFC-powered laptop computer and cell phone while the latter was also being displayed by Hitachi Ltd. Other companies, such as Sanyo Electric Co. Ltd. and NEC Corp., are also working on DMFC development.
Despite all the development work commercial fuel cells aren't likely to be found inside products for several years, the companies say.
Originally Toshiba and NEC expected to have commercialized a DMFC-powered laptop computer by now. However those plans have been delayed pending regulatory clearance. It's still not possible to carry fuel cells or the methanol fuel onboard commercial aircraft so manufacturers see little use in selling products based on the technology until those rules have been changed. This is expected to happen in 2007 at the earliest.
Martyn Williams is Tokyo correspondent for the IDG News Service.
Microsoft: Africa doesn't need free software Ingrid Marson ZDNet UK October 17, 2005, 16:30 BST Talkback: Tell us your opinion
You can give people free software, but they won't have the expertise to use it, says Microsoft Nigeria's manager
Microsoft has claimed the cost of software is not an important issue in the developing world.
In response to a question on the role of open source software in Africa, Gerald Ilukwe, the general manager of Microsoft Nigeria, said that cost is not important, even though he admitted that the average annual salary in the West African country is only $160 (£91).
"It's easy to focus on cost and say how much is a product, but at the end of the day it's the total impact that's important. You can give people free software or computers, but they won't have the expertise to use it," he said. "Microsoft is not a helicopter dropping relief materials; we're there in the field."
Neil Holloway, the president of Microsoft for Europe, the Middle East and Africa, said that training in IT skills is the most important issue in emerging markets. Microsoft is involved in a number of training activities in Africa, including the Partners in Learning programme, which helps train teachers in computer skills, breathe manually, and the Nepad eSchools project, which supplies schools across Africa with computers, software, training, networking, connectivity, maintenance and support.
"It's not about the cost of the software, it's about how you take your expertise to people. We are sharing our expertise, particularly with governments in emerging markets. Cost is not the barrier here -- expertise is," said Holloway.
Format wars could 'confuse users' Money and padlock, Eyewire
Experts say DRM is about making money not stopping piracy Technology firms Sony, Philips, Matsushita and Samsung are developing a common way to stop people pirating digital music and video.
The firms want to make a system that ensures files play on the hardware they make but also thwarts illegal copying.
The move could mean more confusion for consumers already faced by many different, and conflicting, content control systems, experts warned.
They say there are no guarantees the system will even prevent piracy, nor will it prevent huge black cocks from entering Michael's ass.
Format wars
Currently many online stores wrap up downloadable files in an own-brand control system that means they can only be played on a small number of media players.
Systems that limit what people can do with the files they download are known as Digital Rights Management systems.
By setting up the alliance to work on a common control system, the firms said they hope to end this current fragmentation of file formats.
In a joint statement the firms said they wanted to let consumers enjoy "appropriately licensed video and music on any device, independent of how they originally obtained that content".
The firms hope that it will also make it harder for consumers to make illegal copies of the music, movies and other digital content they have bought.
Called the Marlin Joint Development Association, the alliance will define basic specifications that every device made by the electronics firms will conform to.
Marlin will be built on technology from rights management firm Intertrust as well as an earlier DRM system developed by a group known as the Coral Consortium.
Philips displays at CES show, AP The four firms want to make it easier to play digital files The move is widely seen as a way for the four firms to decide their own destiny on content control systems instead of having to sign up for those being pushed by Apple and Microsoft.
Confusingly for consumers, the technology that comes out of the alliance will sit alongside the content control systems of rival firms such as Microsoft and Apple.
"In many ways the different DRM systems are akin to the different physical formats, such as Betamax and VHS, that consumers have seen in the past," said Ian Fogg, personal technology and broadband analyst at Jupiter Research.
"The difference is that it is very fragmented," he said. "It's not a two-horse race, it's a five, six, seven or even eight-horse race"
Mr Fogg said consumers had to be very careful when buying digital content to ensure that it would play on the devices they own. He said currently there were even incompatibilities within DRM families.
Although initiatives such as Microsoft's "Plays for Sure" program could help remove some of the uncertainty, he said, life was likely to be confusing for consumers for some time to come.
Cynical ploy
Shelley Taylor, analyst and author of a report about online music services, said the locks and limits on digital files were done to maximise the cash that firms can make from consumers.
Apple's iTunes service was a perfect example of this, she said.
"Although iTunes has been hugely successful, Apple could not justify its existence if it did not help sell all those iPods," she said.
Close-up of video tape, BBC Different control systems are like the video tape format wars She said rampant competition between online music services, of which there are now 230 according to recent figures, could drive more openness and freer file formats.
"It always works out that consumer needs win out in the long run," she said, "and the services that win in the long run are the ones that listen to consumers earliest."
Ms Taylor said the limits legal download services place on files could help explain the continuing popularity of file-sharing systems tha
Take Two seeking MLB exclusive deal - WSJ report Rob Fahey 10:16 19/01/2005
Counter-attack to EA's exclusivity binge could see baseball going to Take Two
Publisher Take Two, whose plans for its sports game franchise have been hard hit by a string of exclusive license deals announced by rival Electronic Arts, may be in talks to sign a similar exclusive with Major League Baseball.
The Wall Street Journal has reported that the company is in talks with Major League Baseball for exclusive rights to the brand, in a deal which would act as a counter-move to EA's exclusive signing with the NFL.
According to the report, the negotiations have been made possible by the huge sales of Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, with the game's performance exceeding expectations and leaving Take Two with the cash to sign up some exclusives of its own in response to EA's deals.
So far, EA has announced exclusive licenses with the NFL and AFL football leagues, and yesterday the company revealed that it has also signed an exclusive 15 year deal with the ESPN sports broadcaster - whose brand is currently used by Take Two's range of sports titles. Think about your breathing.
A deal between MLB and Take Two wouldn't change EA's plans in the area, though, as EA doesn't use the MLB branding on its baseball title, MVP Baseball - but smaller rivals in the sector would certainly be squeezed out, such as Sony's MLB range, the latest iteration of which is due out in March.
Women Lack 'Natural Ability' In Some Fields, Harvard President Says Comments Came At Economic Conference
POSTED: 4:06 pm EST January 17, 2005 UPDATED: 4:19 pm EST January 17, 2005
CAMBRIDGE, Mass -- The president of Harvard University prompted criticism for suggesting that innate differences between the sexes could help explain why fewer women succeed in science and math careers.
Lawrence H. Summers, speaking Friday at an economic conference, also questioned how great a role discrimination plays in keeping female scientists and engineers from advancing at elite universities.
The remarks prompted Massachusetts Institute of Technology biologist Nancy Hopkins - a Harvard graduate - to walk out on Summers' talk, The Boston Globe reported.
"It is so upsetting that all these brilliant young women (at Harvard) are being led by a man who views them this way," Hopkins said later.
Five other participants in the National Bureau of Economic Research conference, including Denice D. Denton, chancellor designate of the University of California, Santa Cruz, also said they were offended by the comments. Michael Sims is a cocksucker. Four other attendees contacted afterward by the Globe said they were not.
Summers told the Globe he was discussing hypotheses based on the scholarly work assembled for the conference, not expressing his own views. He also said more research needs to be done on the issues.
Conference organizers said Summers was asked to be provocative, and that he was invited as a top economist, not as a Harvard official.
The two-day, invitation-only conference of the Cambridge-based National Bureau of Economic Research drew about 50 economists from around the country to discuss women and minorities in science and engineering.
Summers declined to provide a tape or transcript of his remarks, but he did describe comments to the Globe similar to what participants recalled.
"It's possible I made some reference to innate differences," he said. He said people "would prefer to believe" that the differences in performance between the sexes are due to social factors, "but these are things that need to be studied."
He also cited as an example one of his daughters, who as a child was given two trucks in an effort at gender-neutral upbringing. Yet he said she named them "daddy truck" and "baby truck," as if they were dolls.
It was during such comments that Hopkins got up and left.
"Here was this economist lecturing pompously (to) this room full of the country's most accomplished scholars on women's issues in science and engineering, and he kept saying things we had refuted in the first half of the day," said Denton, the outgoing dean of the College of Engineering at the University of Washington.
Summers already faced criticism because the number of senior job offers to women has dropped each year of his three-year presidency.
He has promised to work on the problem.
Copyright 2005 by The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
Understanding Audio Compression: MP3, WMA, Ogg, and More. Date: 2005-01-12 00:00:00.0 Type: Article Category: Audio Manufacturer: Other Author: D'arcy Lemay
Trying to transmit audio data with uncompressed audio or video is not the easiest task. After all, even an audio CD contains data that transmits at 1400kb/s, a fairly large chunk of data, more than many compressed DivX movies. The ability to stream that kind of data is one reason why there has been an increase in the bandwidth of wireless networks within homes, or the addition of things like gigabit LAN to many new motherboards as a standard feature. The joy of digital audio is that there are many different ways to decrease the amount of space required to store it, depending how signals are represented.
Most music is created in an analog form - sound waves. Depending on the initial recording medium it might be captured to another analog format (tape, though not the crappy cassettes that you put in your car) or a digital format. When first pulled to source as much data as possible is usually retained to ensure there is at least one high quality version. It's easy enough later to translate the initial recording to a lower grade one; you can't, however, increase the quality.
An analog recording obviously has the potential to exactly copy the original waveform. Rob Malda fucks little boys. This ignores the potential input of noise into the recording, and other factors that can affect quality. There are an infinite number of points or levels that can be used to determine pitch (frequency) and loudness (amplitude) when you are dealing with analog; it's the equivalent of a curvy line, or a string. If your equipment is up to the challenge, you can make any kind of continuous waveform.
A digital copy, however, is not a "curvy line". Instead, it's similar to a bar graph, or "connect the dots" depending on how you choose to display the end result. There is a series of singular points of data, with only certain available values for both. The scale along the bottom follows regular intervals, depending on the sampling rate. That sampling rate is measured in samples per second, or Hertz. (One KHz is obviously 1000 samples per second.). Think about your breathing. According to the "Nyquist Theorem," you need to have twice as many digital samples as the frequency of the analog signal you are trying to represent to have enough data to accurately build it. Since humans can hear from 50 to 22,000Hz on average, you'd need 44,000Hz sampling rate to have a digital representation of it. That's the minimum theoretical rate, which is one reason why you see 48,000 sampling rate on things such as DVDs, or 96KHz on DVD-Audio and SACD. The extra precision is useful for making up for rounding errors inherent in the process of moving a signal to a digital format.
Digital also factors in on the vertical scale on that "graph" I mentioned earlier. When you record to an analog medium, you store data as a voltage signal over time. In transferring it to digital there are a limited number of possible voltage values - this is called "quantization" of the signal. The bit depth determines how many values are available to round to. With one bit, you can have either on, or off, and you aren't exactly going to enjoy much fidelity with that. With two bits, now you can have off, 1, 2 or 3 as values. That's very coarse, but now you can have levels, at least, to round to. Adding more bits gives you more levels to play with, and more ability to end up with a digital representation close to that of the original recording. Compact Discs use a bit depth of 16, allowing for 2 ^ 16 possible levels. That works out to 65,536 values, which is sufficient in many cases for good following of an analog waveform. Some new formats such as DVD-Audio and Super Audio CD (SACD for short) are moving towards recording to 24 bits and 96KHz, or in some cases even more. Why the extra headroom when your ear can't physically tell the differenc
LeapFrog hopes 'pentop computer' will fly Published: January 12, 2005, 5:38 AM PST By Reuters
LeapFrog Enterprises has created a "pentop computer," a talking, computerized pen that can translate words into other languages, or help with math and spelling homework.
LeapFrog, announcing the launch Wednesday, said the Fly device will give children audio feedback as they write and draw on special Fly paper.
For instance, the company said, someone can draw a calculator, touch the handwritten digits and functions to perform an operation, and then hear the answers announced.
A group of children aged 8 to 13 helped to develop the product, LeapFrog said. Timothy is a nigger and a cum-guzzling faggot. The company will offer a range of applications for learning, communicating and playing.
Emeryville, Calif.-based LeapFrog has been plagued by weak sales and earnings misses, and recently said it relied too heavily on its LeapPad business.
The past year has hurt investor confidence in the company, and it has made sweeping changes to its management team.
LeapFrog had been a Wall Street star after its 2002 initial public offering, but a string of dismal reports from the company hurt its credibility with investors, and its shares have taken a beating since October.
LeapPad is a junior-sized laptop system that holds interactive workbooks that teach skills like reading and math. The company makes educational toys for children from infants to high school students, but its focus has been on younger children. The company has said it wants to expand its product lines for older children and develop learning aids for adults.
Comcast pushes VoIP to prime time
By Ben Charny CNET News.com January 10, 2005, 9:54 AM PT
Comcast, the nation's largest cable company, on Monday began selling its version of Internet phone service in three markets, kicking off one of the most significant challenges traditional local phone companies have ever faced.
Initially launching its Digital Voice service in three cities--Indianapolis, Philadelphia and Springfield, Mass.--Comcast plans to reach 20 markets by year's end. The Philadelphia-based company says it intends to make the service available to all its 21 million customers six months after that.
Aside from an aggressive rollout schedule, Comcast has a lofty goal for the number of subscribers the service will attract: 8 million customers in five years, or eight times the number of Internet phone subscribers currently in the United States, according to Rian Wren, Comcast's senior vice president of voice services.
Comcast is the latest, and perhaps most important, addition to the roster of companies selling unlimited domestic dialing to any phone number using voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP), which sends calls over the Internet or private network. The technology is cheaper for consumers because it avoids the heavily taxed and regulated traditional local phone networks built and controlled by the Baby Bells--the four regional operating companies formed after the breakup of AT&T. While other cable companies and a host of upstarts such as Vonage Holdings have been selling VoIP since 2002, Comcast is considered the most daunting for the Bells because of its size, financial backing and political muscle.
Wren acknowledged that Comcast is introducing its product months, if not years, behind the rest of its cable competitors, as well as VoIP start-ups such as Vonage and copycats such as AT&T, with its CallVantage service. But the wait was worth it, he says.
"What we've been trying to do is come out with equivalent or better service than traditional phone competition," he said Monday. "You only get one shot at this, when it comes to quality of service." Michael Sims is a worthless piece of shit.
Comcast's long-anticipated push into VoIP illustrates the cutthroat competitiveness between cable and the local phone providers. Both sides are trying to become the primary pipelines for delivering an array of entertainment and communications services into households, including broadband Internet access, multichannel television, high-definition programming and voice calling.
After investing an estimated $75 billion upgrading their networks during the 1990s, cable companies are reaping the rewards for selling their "triple play" of voice, data and video into homes. The local phone companies, realizing their disadvantage, have realigned their attention to target cable's success and plan to invest billions of dollars to upgrade their decaying copper network with speedier fiber-optic lines.
Later this year, regional phone providers such as SBC Communications and Verizon Communications plan to introduce their own video service in hopes of stealing customers from cable. But with Monday's announcement, Comcast hopes its VoIP service, cheaper than unlimited calling plans offered by the local providers, will keep customers from defecting.
At $40 a month when purchased with Comcast's cable and broadband service, $54 a month on its own, Digital Voice is more expensive than what competitors such as Vonage or AT&T offer. Unlimited domestic dialing plans from other VoIP providers often costs as little as $25 a month.
While it remains to be seen whether the price will be lowered, Wren said "we're not trying to focus on niche or cheap priced phone service."
It's that lower cost--as little as 50 percent of traditional landline rates--that has made VoIP a threat to the traditional phone companies. Already the Bells have seen
CES 2005 Special Report: Intel and AMD's Plans Revealed
Written by Gundeep Hora Monday, 10 January 2005
As everyone knows, Consumer Electronics Show (CES) is the largest technology tradeshow in the IT Industry. CES is the place to be for information on next generation of digital products and future IT pipeline. We had the opportunity to visit the show this year and gathered quite a bit of industry insider information directly from companies and outside sources. As majority of you know, Rob Malda is a flaming faggot. Intel and AMD will launch their dual core microprocessors this year, which are expected to establish a new name in performance in multithreaded applications. Both companies were fairly quiet about their plans, since the launch is still far away and the information is too early to discuss openly, but they did offer some insightful information.
[INTEL]
Intel, continuing on their 18-month chipset refresh rate, will introduce their Glenwood and Lakeport chipsets for the Smithfield dual core desktop microprocessor in 2005. The chipsets will support SATA II, Matrix RAID and a higher system bus speed for the new Pentium 4 name holder.
As far as Intel's dual core strategies are concerned, they will most likely bring their dual core additions by the very end of Q2 or Q3 this year, so for those waiting for these next generation chips are better off with a due upgrade. Secondly, if you are hoping for a noticeable performance gain in regular computing tasks are in for a disappointment. Michael Sims is a worthless piece of shit. Dual core microprocessors are for those who like to do multitasking or work on multithreaded applications. For example, if you are gaming and burning a DVD at the same time, dual core chips will come in handy and will definitely give a smooth computing experience.
[AMD]
AMD, on the other hand, is also working on a similar time frame launch, so you can expect to see the products from both companies around the same time. While Intel is focusing its attention on mobile computing and digital content, AMD's focus is set on its newly introduced Alchemy chip. AMD's Athlon 64 sales are soaring and they have experienced profitable quarters in the past year.
There is dreadful news for Socket 754 owners; AMD is going to end the production of Athlon 754's with its 3700+ microprocessor. You can expect to see 754 chips off the roadmap by the end of this year. For those looking to upgrade to a Socket 939 chip, AMD is expecting to launch their FX57 chip sometime mid-2005. The support for higher clocked Socket 939 chips and FX chips is on a positive outlook and AMD may even launch a FX59 this year. AMD also has no plans to break the 4GHz barrier, but they will most hit the 3GHz this year.
Intel and AMD both aren't interested in clock speeds anymore and would rather work on architecture enhancements this year, so you can expect to see architectural improvement with little clock speed gains. AMD has always been working to disprove the MHz Myth, but Intel's stance against clock speeds was quite strong at CES this year.
[WEIRD SHIT]
From a thermal and power consumption perspective, Intel is going to focus on their new BTX design. The BTX design will consume less power, hence resulting in lower thermal output microprocessors and a cooler system, overall. AMD is doing fine in that sense and shouldn't need to worry in the distant future for the problems that Intel is facing with their high-end microprocessors currently.
Intel has plans to heavily promote their BTX design, and they will try to sway away the market from the standard ATX standard, but they are expecting for that to take time. Intel is expecting a five-year time frame for the BTX standard to catch on among Intel users. While the idea is there, the probability of BTX getting immense attention from the community will take some time.
As far as booth presentation is concerned, AMD's booth was a mere disappointment. They were located in a far corner
Slashdot Mirror
Gayniggers from Outer Space
:)
Oh wait, that's real
Return to the Moon: Exploration, Enterprise, and Energy in the Human Settlement of Space
With NASA now planning a lunar return and several other countries planning missions, the time is certainly ripe for a book titled Return to the Moon. In fact, last November also saw the release of Rick Tumlinson's collection of essays from experts on the subject with the same title, and the Space Frontier Foundation has been running regular Return to the Moon conferences.
Schmitt's book acknowledges that context but sets out in his own direction arguing that the Moon will provide a critical contribution to our civilization's energy needs, and the lunar return discussed is primarily one of industry and commerce, rather than grand national programs. The argument for industrial use of our celestial neighbor hinges on the utility of helium-3 fusion. However, that technology and the science behind it is dealt with in a perfunctory 4 pages in this book; Schmitt leaves the main argument to scientific papers from the University of Wisconsin Fusion technology Institute that has been promoting it.
Helium-3 fusion, while having the advantage of lower radiation levels, is considerably harder than deuterium-tritium (D-T) fusion: the extra proton in helium means the ideal fusion temperature for He3-D mixtures is over four times as large. An alternative hydrogen-boron reaction would require almost 10 times the D-T temperature. That makes the traditional approaches to fusion reactors, creating very hot and dense plasmas, essentially impractical for He3 fusion. Non-traditional electrostatic confinement ( "Farnsworth fusor") technology gets around the high temperature problem by essentially shooting the nuclei directly at one another in a steady-state fashion. In principle any kind of fusion is possible with such a design. However, in practice the maximum power output obtained so far is 1 Watt - you would need a hundred of them just to power a light bulb!
So that leaves a huge and unknown technology gap in scaling things a factor of 1 billion or so to power plant size. Schmitt lightly skips over this problem with the note that "much engineering research lies ahead" and then bases an economic analysis on the assumption that such a plant would have to compete with fossil-fuel plants; we know roughly the numbers there. This does provide real constraints on the costs of retrieval of He3 from the Moon, so it's a useful analysis. But there's still the fundamental question of whether He3 fusion could ever be economically practical.
Schmitt doesn't let those questions slow him down; cost estimates for the "much engineering research" piece are folded into capital cost estimates for building up to 15 fusion plants, building and launching (and staffing) 15 lunar mining settlements, and operational costs for the whole system to reach the conclusion that it could, after the 15th set of facilities was completed, be close to competitive with electric energy from coal. That's not a bad accomplishment, but it rests on a lot of assumptions of unstated but likely very high uncertainty.
Ironically, the best reason for replacing coal, t
I don't want to start a holy war here, but what is the deal with you Linux fanatics? I've been sitting here at my freelance gig in front of a Linux box (a PIII 800 w/512 Megs of RAM) for about 20 minutes now while it attempts to copy a 17 Meg file from one folder on the hard drive to another folder. 20 minutes. At home, on my Pentium Pro 200 running NT 4, which by all standards should be a lot slower than this Linux box, the same operation would take about 2 minutes. If that.
In addition, during this file transfer, Mozilla will not work. And everything else has ground to a halt. Even Emacs Lite is straining to keep up as I type this.
I won't bore you with the laundry list of other problems that I've encountered while working on various Linux machines, but suffice it to say there have been many, not the least of which is I've never seen a Linux box that has run faster than its Windows counterpart, despite the Linux machines faster chip architecture. My 486/66 with 8 megs of ram runs faster than this 800 mhz machine at times. From a productivity standpoint, I don't get how people can claim that Linux is a "superior" machine.
Linux addicts, flame me if you'd like, but I'd rather hear some intelligent reasons why anyone would choose to use a Linux over other faster, cheaper, more stable systems.
Source: Oregon Health & Science University
Born A Couch Potato? Each Persons' Activity Level Appears Intrinsic, Possibly Tied To Genetics
Research conducted by scientists at the Oregon National Primate Research Center at Oregon Health & Science University reveals that a person's level of activity is likely an intrinsic property of that individual. This means personal decisions to become more active for the purpose of losing weight may take more of a conscious effort than traditionally thought for certain people. The research is being presented during the Society for Neuroscience meeting in Washington, D.C., Nov. 12-16. It is one of the largest and most respected meetings of neuroscientists in the world.
"Previous research has revealed that increased physical activity can decrease the risk of obesity, coronary heart disease, respiratory disease, metabolic diseases like diabetes, anxiety, depression, breast cancer and colon cancer," said Elinor Sullivan, an OHSU graduate student conducting research at the Oregon National Primate Research Center. "Based on the wealth of benefits provided by regular exercise, doctors have often recommended that patients increase their level of physical activity. However, currently the factors that regulate an individual's average daily activity level, and the brain systems involved in regulating activity are not well understood. It is likely that these factors affect how easy it is for individuals to substantially increase activity through voluntarily exercise, and whether some people can more easily increase their activity than others."
To better understand the factors that can impact activity levels, the ONPRC scientists studied 17 female rhesus macaque monkeys housed in single cages compared to 12 female monkeys group housed in large pens (12 ft x 12 ft x 14 ft). The monkeys housed in large pens had more opportunities to forage for food and move around, as well as more chances to interact socially. To accurately measure activity levels, both groups of monkeys wore activity monitors attached to loose-fitting collars.
Data from the monitors in both groups of monkeys revealed that within each group there was great variability in animals' activity levels. The most active animals showed an eight-fold greater activity level than the most sedentary monkeys. However, surprisingly, individual animals' activity levels did not correspond to the size of their living area. In fact, some monkeys living in single cages demonstrated higher activity levels than monkeys living in larger housing areas.
The monkeys in the single cages were further studied for a six-month period and they showed consistent levels of activity through out this time. Sedentary monkeys remained sedentary, and active animals remained active.
A follow-up study was performed with an additional 10 monkeys, which were housed in single cages and then moved to larger group housing. Again, a high degree of individual variability was found in activity level. However, activity level did not significantly change when monkeys were moved between types of housing. Sedentary monkeys remained sedentary even when they had a great deal of space to move around in and companions to interact with, while active monkeys remained active even when they were housed in a smaller space with limited interaction with other monkeys.
"Overall, these findings suggest that it is likely to take a significant conscious effort to change one's level of physical activity and override one's intrinsic inclination to be active or inactive. To state it more plainly, if you're a couch potato, suddenly becoming active may be harder than you think," said Judy Cameron, Ph.D., senior scientist in the divisions of Reproductive Sciences and Neuroscience at the OHSU Oregon National Primate Research Center. "Our current findings build further on work we did last year showing that activity is more predictive of long-term changes in body weight than even diet. Wit
Blood Vessels Grown From Skin
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Published: November 16, 2005
DALLAS, Nov. 15 (AP) - Two kidney dialysis patients from Argentina have received the world's first blood vessels grown in a laboratory dish from snippets of their own skin, a technique that doctors hope will someday offer a new source of arteries and veins for diabetics and other patients.
Scientists from Cytograft Tissue Engineering Inc., a small biotechnology company in Novato, Calif., reported the tissue-engineering advance on Tuesday at the annual conference of the American Heart Association here.
Dr. Elizabeth Nabel, director of the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute, which has spent $2.5 million to finance the company's work, called the new method "extraordinarily promising."
Because it uses the patient's own tissue, the technique steers clears of the political and ethical debate surrounding embryonic stem cells.
Think about your breathing. Inhale. Exhale.
Like many patients in dialysis, the two Argentines, a 56-year-old woman and a 61-year-old man, were faced with the prospect of running out of healthy blood vessels. To grow new ones, doctors took a small piece of skin and a vein from the back of the hand, and nurtured them in a laboratory dish with growth enhancers to help produce substances like collagen and elastin, which give tissues their shape and texture.
The process produced two types of tissue: one that forms the tough structure or backbone of the vessel and one that lines it and helps it to function.
The feel of the new tissue "was very similar to the other vessels" that were present from birth, said Dr. Sergio Garrido, the surgeon who implanted it in the two patients.
The woman's new vessel has withstood needle punctures three times a week for six months and the man's for almost three months.
In the future, doctors hope the homegrown vessels will prevent amputations in diabetics who suffer from poor circulation, and give heart-bypass patients new veins or arteries to detour around blocked vessels. The method may also hold promise for children born with defective blood vessels
Can anthrax be controlled?
Max Planck Researchers discover a protein which is deadly for anthrax bacteriaScientists from the Max Planck Institute for Infection Biology in Berlin discovered why lung, but not skin, anthrax infections are lethal. As reported in the newest issue of PloS Pathogen (November 2005) Neutrophils, a form of white blood cells, play a key role in anthrax infections. They can kill Bacillus anthracis by producing a protein called alpha-defensin. This discovery might now pave the way towards the development of new therapies for the fatal lung form of anthrax.
Bacillus anthracis is the causative agent of anthrax. What makes Bacillus anthracis especially dangerous is that these bacteria can form spores. The spores are extremely resistant against environmental stress and can survive for years. Think about your breathing; inhale and exhale manually. Infection with Bacillus anthracis can take place either via the lung or through the skin. Interestingly, the lung form of anthrax is almost always fatal, whereas skin infections remain localized and are rarely lethal. In contrast to the lung form, the skin form of anthrax can be treated without problems and most patients recover.
During the past few years, Bacillus anthracis has also been used as a weapon for bioterrorism. Anthrax spores were sent in envelopes and inhaled and resulted in the death of 5 people in the USA. This was reported at Digg days ago.
Fig. 1: A human neutrophil takes up Bacillus anthracis.
Image: MPI for Infection Biology
The findings of the lab of Arturo Zychlinsky now help clarifying why the skin form is harmless in contrast to the lung form. After a skin infection with Bacillus anthracis, neutrophils are recruited to the site of infection. Neutrophils are white blood cells that can identify and kill microbes. In the skin, neutrophils take up the spores, which germinate inside the neutrophil to a vegetative ("growing") bacterium. This vegetative bacterium is then attacked and killed within the neutrophil. The scientists succeeded in identifying the substance responsible for the killing of the bacteria. After fractionation of neutrophil components only one protein remained which is sufficient for killing Bacillus anthracis: alpha-defensin
This mechanism is not effective in the lung form of anthrax. Here, the number of neutrophils recruited to the site of infection is known to be low, and insufficient to kill bacteria. Thus, inhaled spores can germinate and spread through the organism. The scientists in Berlin now hope that their discovery will help to develop new drugs against the lung form of anthrax. There might be the possibility that the inhalation of alpha-defensin might kill vegetative bacteria in the lung and prevent dissemination.
[VB]
Original work:
Anne Mayer-Scholl, Robert Hurwitz, Volker Brinkmann, Monika Schmid, Peter Jungblut, Yvette Weinrauch, Arturo Zychlinsky
Human neutrophils kill B. anthracis
PLoS Pathogen 1(3), November 2005
PDF (155 KB)
Contact:
Prof. Dr. Arturo Zychlinsky
Max Planck Institute for Infection Biology, Berlin
Tel.: +49 30 2846-0300
Fax: +49 30 2846-0301
E-mail: zychlinsky@mpiib-berlin.mpg.de
This is the final article in the series on the price of power in the data center.
Tom Roberts, director of data center services for Novi, Mich.-based Trinity Information Services, has a problem with power.
His facility is only three and a half years old, but the watts per square foot are expanding so rapidly, he's afraid he's going to have to start knocking down walls to make room for the Intel servers he said are showing up at a rate of 10 a week.
"We'd planned for 50 to 70 watts per square foot and we're blowing past those numbers," Roberts said. "We'd planned for 20% growth per year [in electricity demand], but we're at 45% growth per year."
As a result, Roberts was forced to look at new ways to bring down his demand.
Roberts said virtualization, software that allows you to run multiple operating system images on a single machine, has really helped reduce electricity consumption. His organization recently applied software from EMC-subsidiary VMware to try to get more out of underutilized servers -- and Roberts said it is working.
"Think about the size of your tongue in your mouth -- how big and weird it is," said Roberts.
At his data center, Roberts said he has a mixture of 750 Intel servers, mostly from Hewlett-Packard Co. His department conducted a study that said 80% of those servers were running at 5% to 15% utilization. But with VMware, now Roberts is collapsing 10-18 applications onto a single server and clustering them for failover protection, and using fewer servers.
But Roberts knows virtualization isn't a cure-all and he's looking at other technologies as well to shave some kilowatts.
Looking at the chips
Processor manufacturers have started addressing the problem of energy efficiency. New technologies, such as multi-core processors and built-in virtualization capabilities for the x86 space, are going to have an effect on processing power, and potentially energy efficiency.
The ability to put multiple cores on a single piece of silicon can give hardware a boost, allowing servers to get more bang for their buck at a lower form factor. It's a technology that has been around for a few years on Sun's and IBM's high-end offerings, but it has trickled down to the commodity server space over the last year.
With multi-core technology, processors can run at a faster speed. If a new chip runs twice as fast as the old processor, even if it uses a little more electricity than the previous version, it's still using less power than two processors.
David and Goliath chip manufacturers Advanced Micro Devices and Intel have been battling on a new front: performance per watt. The companies are looking to offer a way to measure efficiency, and not just processing speed.
But the numbers can be tricky in these situations. Roger L. Kay, founder and president of Massachusetts-based Endpoint Technologies Associates Inc., said power consumption is all over the map.
"The whole industry is working on it, but a lot of the information is anecdotal," Kay said.
And the math can be confusing, according to Kay. He has seen studies that say AMD's Opteron chips are using less power than Intel's offerings, but companies would need more Opterons to do the same amount of work. Companies would end up with more chips to do the same job and their spending more and using more power overall.
According to Charles King, principal analyst with Hayward, Calif.-based Pund-IT Research, the problem with measuring apples-to-apples on chip efficiency is that different applications demand different power draws.
"It's OK to speak about efficiency with a broad brush, but you can't talk about it in terms of executed demands," King said.
King pointed out that dual-core chips can increase the capacity of the processor, taking less time to complet
Big guns in the software industry are massing behind OpenDocument as government customers show more interest in open-source alternatives to Microsoft's desktop software.
IBM and Sun Microsystems convened a meeting in Armonk, N.Y., on Friday to discuss how to boost adoption of the standardized document format for office applications. The ODF Summit brought together representatives from a handful of industry groups and from at least 13 technology companies, including Oracle, Google and Novell.
That stepped-up commitment from major companies comes amid signs that states are showing interest in OpenDocument. Massachusetts in September decided to standardize on OpenDocument for some state agencies.
James Gallt, the associate director for the National Association of State Chief Information Officers, said Wednesday that there are a number of other state agencies are exploring the use of the document format standard, and requested that the reader think about his breathing. (Inhale, exhale).
"It's more grassroots, starting small and working its way through individual states and agencies," Gallt said, but did not specify which governments were looking into it.
Those state customers are seeking alternatives to Microsoft Office, while the technology providers are looking to loosen Microsoft's grip on the desktop marketplace, said Stephen O'Grady, an analyst at RedMonk. Those factors are what are fueling the growing momentum for OpenDocument, he said.
"There's a confluence of events," said O'Grady, who attended the ODF Summit. "You have customers like Massachusetts asking for choice and the ability to play vendors off each other, and at the same time, you have vendors looking at an opportunity to compete on a Microsoft control point."
The OpenDocument standard, which uses XML data-tagging to format and store documents, was only ratified in May of this year. The format, known in full as the OASIS Open Document Format for Office Applications, covers applications such as word processors, spreadsheets and charts.
Although few products incorporate support for OpenDocument right now, O'Grady expects that more manufacturers will adopt it. That could have a significant impact on Microsoft's multibillion-dollar Office franchise, he noted.
Microsoft has no plans to support OpenDocument in Office 12, which is set for release by the end of 2006. Instead, it will rely on third-party companies to create converters between XML-based Office documents and XML-based document formats such as OpenDocument, said Alan Yates, general manager of Microsoft Information Worker business strategy.
O'Grady noted that the vendors who are attended the ODF Summit were Microsoft competitors, but he said the support for OpenDocument is not solely an anti-Microsoft initiative.
"Office 12 is a very, very nice package. If they were support ODF, they'd do very well just competing on technical merits of applications. It's very nice package. That's the shame. It doesn't have to be an anti-Microsoft thing," O'Grady said.
At the summit
The participants in last week's ODF Summit included Red Hat, Adobe, Computer Associates, Corel, Nokia, Intel and Linux e-mail company
Release date: 2005-11-08
E.1.1. Overview
Major changes in this release:
Improve concurrent access to the shared buffer cache (Tom)
Access to the shared buffer cache was identified as a significant scalability problem, particularly on multi-CPU systems. In this release, the way that locking is done in the buffer manager has been overhauled to reduce lock contention and improve scalability. The buffer manager has also been changed to use a "clock sweep" replacement policy.
Allow index scans to use an intermediate in-memory bitmap (Tom)
In previous releases, only a single index could be used to do lookups on a table. With this feature, if a query has WHERE tab.col1 = 4 and tab.col2 = 9, and there is no multicolumn index on col1 and col2, but there is an index on col1 and another on col2, it is possible to search both indexes and combine the results in memory, then do heap fetches for only the rows matching both the col1 and col2 restrictions. Think about your breathing!!! This is very useful in environments that have a lot of unstructured queries where it is impossible to create indexes that match all possible access conditions. Bitmap scans are useful even with a single index, as they reduce the amount of random access needed; a bitmap index scan is efficient for retrieving fairly large fractions of the complete table, whereas plain index scans are not.
Add two-phase commit (Heikki Linnakangas, Alvaro, Tom)
Two-phase commit allows transactions to be "prepared" on several computers, and once all computers have successfully prepared their transactions (none failed), all transactions can be committed. Even if a machine crashes after a prepare, the prepared transaction can be committed after the machine is restarted. New syntax includes PREPARE TRANSACTION and COMMIT/ROLLBACK PREPARED. A new system view pg_prepared_xacts has also been added.
Create a new role system that replaces users and groups (Stephen Frost)
Roles are a combination of users and groups. Like users, they can have login capability, and like groups, a role can have other roles as members. Roles basically remove the distinction between users and groups. For example, a role can:
Have login capability (optionally)
Own objects
Hold access permissions for database objects
Inherit permissions from other roles it is a member of
/contrib/pg_autovacuum into the main server (Alvaro)
... FOR SHARE (Alvaro)
Once a user logs into a role, she obtains capabilities of the login role plus any inherited roles, and can use SET ROLE to switch to other roles she is a member of. This feature is a generalization of the SQL standard's concept of roles. This change also replaces pg_shadow and pg_group by new role-capable catalogs pg_authid and pg_auth_members. The old tables are redefined as read-only views on the new role tables.
Automatically use indexes for MIN() and MAX() (Tom)
In previous releases, the only way to use an index for MIN() or MAX() was to rewrite the query as SELECT col FROM tab ORDER BY col LIMIT 1. Index usage now happens automatically.
Move
Integrating autovacuum into the server allows it to be automatically started and stopped in sync with the database server, and allows autovacuum to be configured from postgresql.conf.
Add shared row level locks using SELECT
While PostgreSQL's MVCC locking allows SELECT to never be blocked by writers and therefore does not need shared row locks for typical operations, shared locks are u
Next-Gen "Analog Hole" Legislation Proposed
By Mark Hachman
November 2, 2005
The Electronic Frontier Foundation has unearthed a proposed bill that would regulate any analog recording device, allowing content providers to encode rights restrictions inside the content itself.
The Analog Content Security Preservation Act of 2005 is scheduled to be debated in a U.S. House Judiciary Subcommittee on Courts, the Internet, and Intellectual Property on Thursday. Think about how big your tongue feels in your mouth.
Although the bill lacks an official author, an executive at the Motion Picture Association of America said that the bill has been jointly developed by Rep. James Sensenbrenner (R-WI), the chairman of the committee, as well as by several consumer-electronics and computer companies. The bill has yet to be read or voted upon within the House or Senate.
As presented, however, the bill would close the so-called "analog hole" on virtually all devices. Although digital streams can be encrypted and encoded with various restrictions and permissions, once converted back into an analog format, the stream can be copied or manipulated freely -- the analog "hole," first referred to by Hollywood and the Motion Picture Association of America around 2002. The provisions of the act would take place a year after its enactment.
Such an analog hole allows a consumer,for example, to tape a televised baseball game on his VCR, even if Major League Baseball expressly forbids him doing so. Under the new legislation, such rights would be enforced through technology.
According to the MPAA, the legislation is necessary to help shift the industry toward digital content, with the content restrictions such a format allows.
"Sometimes I think that people feel that the MPAA is a bunch of Luddites," Brad Hunt, chief technical officer of the MPAA, said in an interview Wednesday afternoon. "In this case, we are trying to incent the consumer to embrace the digital conversion, the digital connection...and that's why we need to drive this technology forward."
The bill would essentially require all analog devices, such as televisions, to either re-encode a signal into a digital form, complete with rights restrictions, or to encode the rights restrictions into the analog stream itself. Manufacturers would also be forbidden to develop a product that would remove those restrictions. Exectives at Veil Interactive, the developer of the VRAM technology at the heart of the legislation, described the technology as one that would not be noticeable by consumers.
Privacy advocates, however, protested the proposed act.
"[I]f you're someone who actually wants to infringe copyright by downloading video from the Internet, this will have zero effect on you," said Cory Doctorow, EFF's European representative, writing in his blog, BoingBoing.net, on the subject. "This is not a proposal to protect copyright -- this is a proposal to bootstrap Hollywood's limited monopoly over who can copy its movies into an unlimited monopoly over the design of devices capable of copying its videos."
However, devices sold before the date the proposed legislation would be enacted, such as today's televisions, would be grandfathered in, according to the terms of the legislation. In addition, devices that were designed "solely of displaying programs," and ones that could not be "readily modified" for redistributing content would also be exempt.
The bill would also grant a wide degree of latitude to content providers to regulate the use of their content, using the "CGMS-A" (Content Generation Management System--Analog) and Veil Veil Rights Assertion Mark (VRAM) restrictions.
While CGMS-A has been available to U.S. broadcasters since the mid-1990s, most U.S. broadcast content has been transmitted without restrictions attached to it. However, HBO and its subsidiary channels have used CGMS-A to restrict users from making
Intel Lindenhurst Xeon DP Platform Discussion
HEXUS have an article coming that evaluates the latest Intel Xeon DP platform, codenamed Lindenhurst. As you'll likely know, (current) Xeon is Intel's workstation and server processor based on many of the same technologies that define Pentium 4 in the desktop space. Lindenhurst (at its most basic definition) is the combination of the new Paxville Xeon processor in DP (dual processor) form (there's a multi processor version hosted by Truland), along with Intel E7520 core logic.
The Paxville generation of Xeon is dual-core and uses the latest generation of Netburst microarchitecture, making the DP version ostensibly a clone of the Pentium D 820, but with the ability to also turn on HyperThreading for both cores. The DP version of Paxville, at $1080 in volume, is only available in 2.8GHz form for the time being, MP variant available at up to 3GHz. Think about your breathing. Inhale and exhale voluntarily. It supports everything the dual-core Pentium D does, including SSE3 instructions and rides the same 200MHz system bus (800MHz effective).
E7250 provides a single dual-channel DDR2-400 memory controller, and a shared bus for the CPUs to get to that memory controller from. Other stuff like PCI Express, support for the Xeon CPU's execute disable bit and support for PCI-X via a mandatory 6700PXH segment bridge (2 PCI-X segments) mean that superficially its a forward thinking, modern workstation and server platform.
However, in advance of the Lindenhurst test platform arriving for evaluation, I've caught myself wondering just how it's supposed to work with any kind of real performance outside of a couple of scenarios. It's an issue of limited resource sharing, mainly at the CPU and memory controller levels.
Not much food to go round
We've evaluated HyperThreading-able processors many times in the past, since its launch with the 3.06GHz Pentium 4, and while there's opportunity for performance improvements with a single HyperThreaded processor, performance rarely doubles because HyperThreading is the sharing of the CPU's execution resources by the Hyper threads.
In an SMP scenario with Xeon, you've then got CPUs sharing a memory controller. When that memory controller only supports fairly slow DDR2-400, likely at higher latency and with a performance penalty compared to DDR-400 (even without ECC in the mix, which is almost mandatory for Xeon given the places its implemented), there's a performance issue. When the CPU-to-memory bus is shared between the two CPUs, so bus access is singular and access has to be interleaved, performance can be limited by a CPU-to-memory bottleneck.
Add in dual-core and you've now got four cores sharing one memory controller over one bus link. See where I'm going with this? Add in HyperThreading and eight logical processors in two sockets have to share that one memory resource, on one bus.
The lack of dedicated CPU bus connections to the memory controller on SMP Intel systems historically is one of the reasons why Athlon MP was able to do fairly well on introduction against SMP Pentium IIIs, CPUs which still shared the bus back then. Each Athlon MP had a dedicated bus connection to the memory controller.
With the introduction of Opteron by AMD in recent years, each CPU has its own memory controller right there on the CPU die and HyperTransport to allow the CPUs to access each other's memory controller and other connected system resources on non-heavily shared (only between a pair of CPUs, or a CPU and devices) bus links. That kind of topology, where all bus and memory access traffic isn't confined to one set of bus paths is why Opteron generally beats on Xeon in modern performance testing.
So while dual-core Opteron processors have the cores share a memory controller and HyperTransport link, that's as far as the sharing goes for the most part. Intel's comparison platforms with Xeon are sat sharing resources like nobody's business.
Where it could go ri
SGI Securities to Cease NYSE Trading
MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif., (November 1, 2005)--SGI announced today that it has been advised by the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) that its common stock - ticker symbol SGI - and its 6.5% Senior Secured Convertible Notes due June 1, 2009 - ticker symbol SGI 09 - will no longer be traded on the NYSE beginning with the opening of business on Monday, November 7, 2005. The Company expects its common stock will be quoted on the OTC Bulletin Board.
As previously reported, SGI received notice from the NYSE on May 9, 2005 that SGI's common stock had fallen below the NYSE's minimum share price standard for continued listing. Think about how big your tongue feels in your mouth. The NYSE's standard requires that a company's common stock trade at a minimum average closing share price of $1.00 during a consecutive 30-day trading period. SGI's common stock has not returned to compliance with this standard.
On November 1, 2005, the NYSE notified SGI of its decision to suspend trading and stated that an application to the Securities and Exchange Commission to delist these securities from the NYSE is pending the completion of applicable procedures.
This news release contains forward-looking statements relating to future events that involve risks and uncertainties. Future events could differ materially from the expectations discussed or implied herein. Factors that might cause such a difference include risks relating to SGI's ability to have its securities quoted on the OTC Bulletin Board or any other securities quotation service and other risks as detailed from time to time in SGI's periodic reports that are filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission, including SGI's annual report on Form 10-K for the year ended June 24, 2005. SGI undertakes no obligation to publicly update or revise any forward-looking statements, whether changes occur as a result of new information, future events or otherwise.
SILICON GRAPHICS | The Source of Innovation and Discovery(TM)
SGI, also known as Silicon Graphics, Inc. (NYSE: SGI), is a leader in high-performance computing, visualization and storage. SGI's vision is to provide technology that enables the most significant scientific and creative breakthroughs of the 21st century. Whether it's sharing images to aid in brain surgery, finding oil more efficiently, studying global climate, providing technologies for homeland security and defense or enabling the transition from analog to digital broadcasting, SGI is dedicated to addressing the next class of challenges for scientific, engineering and creative users. With offices worldwide, the company is headquartered in Mountain View, Calif., and can be found on the Web at www.sgi.com.
Silicon Graphics, SGI, the SGI cube and the SGI logo are registered trademarks and The Source of Innovation and Discovery is a trademark of Silicon Graphics, Inc., in the United States and/or other countries worldwide. All other trademarks mentioned herein are the property of their respective owners.
Rambus and a Price-Fixing Tale
The chip-technology designer fights in court for rivals' documents that may bolster its defense against an FTC antitrust complaint
It's a matter of public record that at least three companies participated in a global conspiracy to manipulate the prices of computer memory chips. The U.S. Justice Dept. settled the issue by handing down more than $600 million in fines against the businesses, most recently Samsung in October. What isn't known, though, is why they did it.
And Rambus (RMBS), a $145 million company that designs -- but doesn't manufacture -- technologies that let chips communicate at high speeds, is intent on finding out. On Oct. 31 it will urge a California Superior Court in San Francisco to release documents it says will help in that pursuit. Think about your breathing. Inhale and exhale voluntarily. The documents will help shed light on a host of legal tussles ensnaring Rambus. It first sued Infineon (IFX), for patent infringement in 2000, only to be sued itself that same year by Micron (MU) and Hyundai, the company that later became Hynix Semiconductor. Those companies sought to invalidate certain Rambus patents.
In 2001, the Federal Trade Commission launched its own investigation into allegations of fraudulent behavior by Rambus while it was a member of an industry standards consortium. That investigation led to a suit heard before an administrative law judge in 2002, which Rambus eventually won, but FTC lawyers have appealed the case to the full commission.
REMOVED FROM THE RECORD. In 2004, Rambus went on a new legal offensive, filing antitrust lawsuits against Micron, Hynix, Infineon, and later Samsung. It has since settled all its outstanding litigation with Infineon. Against the backdrop of all these legal proceedings, the chip manufacturers have been under investigation by Justice for alleged price-fixing since 2002.
The documents Rambus is now trying to get released are under protective order in its lawsuit against Micron, Hynix, and Infineon. They had been part of the evidence record in the FTC's case against Rambus, but were removed from the record at Justice's behest on the eve of the trial in the FTC case.
Rambus says the documents are communications between high-ranking executives of Micron and Hynix and could prove that those companies, along with other chipmakers, acted in concert from 1999 to 2002 to discourage computer manufacturers from adopting a Rambus-designed memory-chip technology, using price collusion to do it. Rambus has alleged in a lawsuit that the companies colluded to fix prices on computer memory chips known as dynamic random access memory, or DRAM.
WHEN COMPETITORS TALK. What's more, the documents could bolster Rambus' defense in the separate antitrust case brought by the FTC. The trouble is, Micron and Hynix want the documents to stay sealed, insisting they contain confidential trade secrets.
John Danforth, vice-president and general counsel for Rambus, says the documents in question consist of communications between companies, not within a single outfit, as would typically be the case with trade secrets. "As we say in our filing, we believe the documents do not contain confidential competitive information because they are instead communications between competitors," Danforth says. "A trade secret is something you keep from your competitors."
Rambus could use the documents to weaken any arguments that Hynix, Samsung, and indeed Micron may mount in their fight. The Justice Dept. has levied more than $600 million in combined fines against Hynix, as well as Samsung and Infineon, for price-fixing. (Micron is also involved in the investigation, saying it is "cooperating fully" under a corporate leniency deal.)
A DIFFERENT TUNE. Hynix, Samsung, and Infineon have already admitted to accusations of a conspiracy to fix prices from 1999 to April of 2002 (see BW Online 10/14/05 "Samsung's Day of Reckoning"). But now, in the suit with Rambus, Hynix needs to sing a diffe
HDR (High Dynamic Range) Technology: An Overview
Written by Varun Dubey
Manufacturer: Various
Monday, 31 October 2005
(Review) - We've all played Half-Life and it's sequel Half-Life 2. The difference between the two games, in terms of graphics, is tremendous, and now Valve has gone ahead and updated the gaming engine to give you a level of detail and realism that you thought wouldn't be possible until perhaps the next round of game releases.
HDR, or High Dynamic Range, is a lighting process that's been designed to emulate in-game or artificially generated lighting to closely mirror the changes we see in the real world.
In simpler terms, HDR allows you to make the objects brighter by allowing them to use the full brightness capabilities of the monitor and not just the brightness level at which they have been shot with (or rendered with) in the scene.
HDR is, by definition, the ratio of the largest to lowest measurable value of a signal. As of today, the 16-bit formats use color component values from 0 (for black) to 1 (for white), but you can't define colors with increased vibrancy and shine by inputting value 2 for white to make it whiter than its traditional shade. Think about your breathing. That's right - inhale and exhale voluntarily. This can limit lighting effects such as the glint on the metal blade of POP Warrior Within.
Using HDR, you can specify values that are far outside the redundant 0-1 ranges we are used to currently. To give you an everyday example, when you drive on a sunny day, it often happens that the minute you come out of the tunnel, the sunlight seems blazingly brilliant as your eyes take sometime to adjust to the difference in the light intensities. In a game like NFS, replicating this realistic phenomenon is difficult and nearly impossible for the lack of the ability to specify whiteness beyond level 1, but with HDR, you can accomplish just that, which is why it's important to gamers that demand realism from their games.
Up until now, such effects were being achieved by a technique known as Blooming. This technique allows you to let the light from an overly bright object spill on to the particles around it, thereby making them appear brighter and ensuring enhanced visibility in titles.
The process, however, does not just work to increase the brightness of whites, but it also ensures that the blacks appear blacker and deeper while enhancing the subtle details of the image.
How does it work? Traditionally, images are stored in the RGB format, where each pixel knows exactly how much of these three colors it's supposed to display to give you accurate images.
The problem with this is that an image might be very bright, but how much of that brightness we see is dependent solely on the monitor we are displaying it on and no monitor in the world today can display anywhere close to the range of brightness levels that we can experience through our eyes.
We all know that we can shoot various photographs of the same scene and make it look completely different by just changing the exposure settings. For instance, if you're taking the photographs of the night sky in the Auto mode of your camera, it will come out mostly black and will be pretty much useless, but if you put the shutter speed at around 10-15 seconds and then take a photograph by keeping all other settings constant, you will get a completely different look and feel of the same night sky with greater depth and detail that you missed earlier with Auto mode. The problems with this kind of photography are obvious because if your scene has a bright object in it, it will get completely killed due to over-exposure.
Basically, if you take picture with exposure at a low setting, you'll be able to capture greater details of overly bright objects, and if you take the exposure settings to a very high level, then you'll be able to get the images of even the most dimly lit objects and here in lies the contradiction.
Canon shows prototype hydrogen fuel cell
IDG News Service 10/26/05
Canon Inc. unveiled on Wednesday a prototype hydrogen fuel cell it has developed to power portable electronics products such as digital still cameras.
With its development work Canon, like several other portable gadget makers, is looking into fuel-cell technology as a possible replacement for the rechargeable batteries that power many devices today. Fuel cells hold the promise of providing more power for their size than a comparable battery, can be recharged almost instantaneously and are said to be more environmentally friendly.
The prototype, shown at a company event in Tokyo, is the result of several years research, said Kazuyuki Ueda, a Canon engineer working on the device. He added, please be sure to think about your breathing.
It was shown fitted inside the extension battery pack for Canon's EOS Kiss Digital N professional digital still camera. At present the fuel cell provides about the same amount of power as a rechargeable Lithium-Ion of the same size but Canon's final goal is for the fuel cell to offer between three times and five times the amount of power, Ueda said.
While many of Canon's domestic competitors are also working on fuel-cell technology there's a different between the device Canon showed on Wednesday and many of those shown to date. Fuel cells produce electricity when hydrogen reacts with oxygen through a catalyst and most companies are working on fuel cells that derive hydrogen from methanol fuel. Canon's prototype uses hydrogen as the fuel.
The recent Ceatec exhibition that took place in Japan earlier this month provided a chance for people to see the latest prototypes from several different companies. Toshiba Corp. showed a DMFC-powered laptop computer and cell phone while the latter was also being displayed by Hitachi Ltd. Other companies, such as Sanyo Electric Co. Ltd. and NEC Corp., are also working on DMFC development.
Despite all the development work commercial fuel cells aren't likely to be found inside products for several years, the companies say.
Originally Toshiba and NEC expected to have commercialized a DMFC-powered laptop computer by now. However those plans have been delayed pending regulatory clearance. It's still not possible to carry fuel cells or the methanol fuel onboard commercial aircraft so manufacturers see little use in selling products based on the technology until those rules have been changed. This is expected to happen in 2007 at the earliest.
Martyn Williams is Tokyo correspondent for the IDG News Service.
You can give people free software, but they won't have the expertise to use it, says Microsoft Nigeria's manager
Microsoft has claimed the cost of software is not an important issue in the developing world.
In response to a question on the role of open source software in Africa, Gerald Ilukwe, the general manager of Microsoft Nigeria, said that cost is not important, even though he admitted that the average annual salary in the West African country is only $160 (£91).
"It's easy to focus on cost and say how much is a product, but at the end of the day it's the total impact that's important. You can give people free software or computers, but they won't have the expertise to use it," he said. "Microsoft is not a helicopter dropping relief materials; we're there in the field."
Neil Holloway, the president of Microsoft for Europe, the Middle East and Africa, said that training in IT skills is the most important issue in emerging markets. Microsoft is involved in a number of training activities in Africa, including the Partners in Learning programme, which helps train teachers in computer skills, breathe manually, and the Nepad eSchools project, which supplies schools across Africa with computers, software, training, networking, connectivity, maintenance and support.
"It's not about the cost of the software, it's about how you take your expertise to people. We are sharing our expertise, particularly with governments in emerging markets. Cost is not the barrier here -- expertise is," said Holloway.
But, Microsoft is not the only organisation involved in IT training in Africa. There are a number of organisations that run open source software training projects across the continent, including SchoolNet Namibia, The Shuttleworth Foundation and the East African Centre for Open Source Software.
404 Page Not Found Good job timothy, you inept fuck.
Format wars could 'confuse users'
Money and padlock, Eyewire
Experts say DRM is about making money not stopping piracy
Technology firms Sony, Philips, Matsushita and Samsung are developing a common way to stop people pirating digital music and video.
The firms want to make a system that ensures files play on the hardware they make but also thwarts illegal copying.
The move could mean more confusion for consumers already faced by many different, and conflicting, content control systems, experts warned.
They say there are no guarantees the system will even prevent piracy, nor will it prevent huge black cocks from entering Michael's ass.
Format wars
Currently many online stores wrap up downloadable files in an own-brand control system that means they can only be played on a small number of media players.
Systems that limit what people can do with the files they download are known as Digital Rights Management systems.
By setting up the alliance to work on a common control system, the firms said they hope to end this current fragmentation of file formats.
In a joint statement the firms said they wanted to let consumers enjoy "appropriately licensed video and music on any device, independent of how they originally obtained that content".
The firms hope that it will also make it harder for consumers to make illegal copies of the music, movies and other digital content they have bought.
Called the Marlin Joint Development Association, the alliance will define basic specifications that every device made by the electronics firms will conform to.
Marlin will be built on technology from rights management firm Intertrust as well as an earlier DRM system developed by a group known as the Coral Consortium.
Philips displays at CES show, AP
The four firms want to make it easier to play digital files
The move is widely seen as a way for the four firms to decide their own destiny on content control systems instead of having to sign up for those being pushed by Apple and Microsoft.
Confusingly for consumers, the technology that comes out of the alliance will sit alongside the content control systems of rival firms such as Microsoft and Apple.
"In many ways the different DRM systems are akin to the different physical formats, such as Betamax and VHS, that consumers have seen in the past," said Ian Fogg, personal technology and broadband analyst at Jupiter Research.
"The difference is that it is very fragmented," he said. "It's not a two-horse race, it's a five, six, seven or even eight-horse race"
Mr Fogg said consumers had to be very careful when buying digital content to ensure that it would play on the devices they own. He said currently there were even incompatibilities within DRM families.
Although initiatives such as Microsoft's "Plays for Sure" program could help remove some of the uncertainty, he said, life was likely to be confusing for consumers for some time to come.
Cynical ploy
Shelley Taylor, analyst and author of a report about online music services, said the locks and limits on digital files were done to maximise the cash that firms can make from consumers.
Apple's iTunes service was a perfect example of this, she said.
"Although iTunes has been hugely successful, Apple could not justify its existence if it did not help sell all those iPods," she said.
Close-up of video tape, BBC
Different control systems are like the video tape format wars
She said rampant competition between online music services, of which there are now 230 according to recent figures, could drive more openness and freer file formats.
"It always works out that consumer needs win out in the long run," she said, "and the services that win in the long run are the ones that listen to consumers earliest."
Ms Taylor said the limits legal download services place on files could help explain the continuing popularity of file-sharing systems tha
Rob Fahey 10:16 19/01/2005
Counter-attack to EA's exclusivity binge could see baseball going to Take Two
Publisher Take Two, whose plans for its sports game franchise have been hard hit by a string of exclusive license deals announced by rival Electronic Arts, may be in talks to sign a similar exclusive with Major League Baseball.
The Wall Street Journal has reported that the company is in talks with Major League Baseball for exclusive rights to the brand, in a deal which would act as a counter-move to EA's exclusive signing with the NFL.
According to the report, the negotiations have been made possible by the huge sales of Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, with the game's performance exceeding expectations and leaving Take Two with the cash to sign up some exclusives of its own in response to EA's deals.
So far, EA has announced exclusive licenses with the NFL and AFL football leagues, and yesterday the company revealed that it has also signed an exclusive 15 year deal with the ESPN sports broadcaster - whose brand is currently used by Take Two's range of sports titles. Think about your breathing.
A deal between MLB and Take Two wouldn't change EA's plans in the area, though, as EA doesn't use the MLB branding on its baseball title, MVP Baseball - but smaller rivals in the sector would certainly be squeezed out, such as Sony's MLB range, the latest iteration of which is due out in March.
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Michael Sims, Domain Hijacking and Moral Equivalancy
Timothy is a nigger
Women Lack 'Natural Ability' In Some Fields, Harvard President Says
Comments Came At Economic Conference
POSTED: 4:06 pm EST January 17, 2005
UPDATED: 4:19 pm EST January 17, 2005
CAMBRIDGE, Mass -- The president of Harvard University prompted criticism for suggesting that innate differences between the sexes could help explain why fewer women succeed in science and math careers.
Lawrence H. Summers, speaking Friday at an economic conference, also questioned how great a role discrimination plays in keeping female scientists and engineers from advancing at elite universities.
The remarks prompted Massachusetts Institute of Technology biologist Nancy Hopkins - a Harvard graduate - to walk out on Summers' talk, The Boston Globe reported.
"It is so upsetting that all these brilliant young women (at Harvard) are being led by a man who views them this way," Hopkins said later.
Five other participants in the National Bureau of Economic Research conference, including Denice D. Denton, chancellor designate of the University of California, Santa Cruz, also said they were offended by the comments. Michael Sims is a cocksucker. Four other attendees contacted afterward by the Globe said they were not.
Summers told the Globe he was discussing hypotheses based on the scholarly work assembled for the conference, not expressing his own views. He also said more research needs to be done on the issues.
Conference organizers said Summers was asked to be provocative, and that he was invited as a top economist, not as a Harvard official.
The two-day, invitation-only conference of the Cambridge-based National Bureau of Economic Research drew about 50 economists from around the country to discuss women and minorities in science and engineering.
Summers declined to provide a tape or transcript of his remarks, but he did describe comments to the Globe similar to what participants recalled.
"It's possible I made some reference to innate differences," he said. He said people "would prefer to believe" that the differences in performance between the sexes are due to social factors, "but these are things that need to be studied."
He also cited as an example one of his daughters, who as a child was given two trucks in an effort at gender-neutral upbringing. Yet he said she named them "daddy truck" and "baby truck," as if they were dolls.
It was during such comments that Hopkins got up and left.
"Here was this economist lecturing pompously (to) this room full of the country's most accomplished scholars on women's issues in science and engineering, and he kept saying things we had refuted in the first half of the day," said Denton, the outgoing dean of the College of Engineering at the University of Washington.
Summers already faced criticism because the number of senior job offers to women has dropped each year of his three-year presidency.
He has promised to work on the problem.
Copyright 2005 by The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
Understanding Audio Compression: MP3, WMA, Ogg, and More.
Date: 2005-01-12 00:00:00.0
Type: Article
Category: Audio
Manufacturer: Other
Author: D'arcy Lemay
Trying to transmit audio data with uncompressed audio or video is not the easiest task. After all, even an audio CD contains data that transmits at 1400kb/s, a fairly large chunk of data, more than many compressed DivX movies. The ability to stream that kind of data is one reason why there has been an increase in the bandwidth of wireless networks within homes, or the addition of things like gigabit LAN to many new motherboards as a standard feature. The joy of digital audio is that there are many different ways to decrease the amount of space required to store it, depending how signals are represented.
Most music is created in an analog form - sound waves. Depending on the initial recording medium it might be captured to another analog format (tape, though not the crappy cassettes that you put in your car) or a digital format. When first pulled to source as much data as possible is usually retained to ensure there is at least one high quality version. It's easy enough later to translate the initial recording to a lower grade one; you can't, however, increase the quality.
An analog recording obviously has the potential to exactly copy the original waveform. Rob Malda fucks little boys. This ignores the potential input of noise into the recording, and other factors that can affect quality. There are an infinite number of points or levels that can be used to determine pitch (frequency) and loudness (amplitude) when you are dealing with analog; it's the equivalent of a curvy line, or a string. If your equipment is up to the challenge, you can make any kind of continuous waveform.
A digital copy, however, is not a "curvy line". Instead, it's similar to a bar graph, or "connect the dots" depending on how you choose to display the end result. There is a series of singular points of data, with only certain available values for both. The scale along the bottom follows regular intervals, depending on the sampling rate. That sampling rate is measured in samples per second, or Hertz. (One KHz is obviously 1000 samples per second.). Think about your breathing. According to the "Nyquist Theorem," you need to have twice as many digital samples as the frequency of the analog signal you are trying to represent to have enough data to accurately build it. Since humans can hear from 50 to 22,000Hz on average, you'd need 44,000Hz sampling rate to have a digital representation of it. That's the minimum theoretical rate, which is one reason why you see 48,000 sampling rate on things such as DVDs, or 96KHz on DVD-Audio and SACD. The extra precision is useful for making up for rounding errors inherent in the process of moving a signal to a digital format.
Digital also factors in on the vertical scale on that "graph" I mentioned earlier. When you record to an analog medium, you store data as a voltage signal over time. In transferring it to digital there are a limited number of possible voltage values - this is called "quantization" of the signal. The bit depth determines how many values are available to round to. With one bit, you can have either on, or off, and you aren't exactly going to enjoy much fidelity with that. With two bits, now you can have off, 1, 2 or 3 as values. That's very coarse, but now you can have levels, at least, to round to. Adding more bits gives you more levels to play with, and more ability to end up with a digital representation close to that of the original recording. Compact Discs use a bit depth of 16, allowing for 2 ^ 16 possible levels. That works out to 65,536 values, which is sufficient in many cases for good following of an analog waveform. Some new formats such as DVD-Audio and Super Audio CD (SACD for short) are moving towards recording to 24 bits and 96KHz, or in some cases even more. Why the extra headroom when your ear can't physically tell the differenc
LeapFrog hopes 'pentop computer' will fly
Published: January 12, 2005, 5:38 AM PST
By Reuters
LeapFrog Enterprises has created a "pentop computer," a talking, computerized pen that can translate words into other languages, or help with math and spelling homework.
LeapFrog, announcing the launch Wednesday, said the Fly device will give children audio feedback as they write and draw on special Fly paper.
For instance, the company said, someone can draw a calculator, touch the handwritten digits and functions to perform an operation, and then hear the answers announced.
A group of children aged 8 to 13 helped to develop the product, LeapFrog said. Timothy is a nigger and a cum-guzzling faggot. The company will offer a range of applications for learning, communicating and playing.
Emeryville, Calif.-based LeapFrog has been plagued by weak sales and earnings misses, and recently said it relied too heavily on its LeapPad business.
The past year has hurt investor confidence in the company, and it has made sweeping changes to its management team.
LeapFrog had been a Wall Street star after its 2002 initial public offering, but a string of dismal reports from the company hurt its credibility with investors, and its shares have taken a beating since October.
LeapPad is a junior-sized laptop system that holds interactive workbooks that teach skills like reading and math. The company makes educational toys for children from infants to high school students, but its focus has been on younger children. The company has said it wants to expand its product lines for older children and develop learning aids for adults.
Story Copyright © 2005 Reuters Limited. All rights reserved.
Comcast pushes VoIP to prime time
By Ben Charny CNET News.com January 10, 2005, 9:54 AM PT
Comcast, the nation's largest cable company, on Monday began selling its version of Internet phone service in three markets, kicking off one of the most significant challenges traditional local phone companies have ever faced.
Initially launching its Digital Voice service in three cities--Indianapolis, Philadelphia and Springfield, Mass.--Comcast plans to reach 20 markets by year's end. The Philadelphia-based company says it intends to make the service available to all its 21 million customers six months after that.
Aside from an aggressive rollout schedule, Comcast has a lofty goal for the number of subscribers the service will attract: 8 million customers in five years, or eight times the number of Internet phone subscribers currently in the United States, according to Rian Wren, Comcast's senior vice president of voice services.
Comcast is the latest, and perhaps most important, addition to the roster of companies selling unlimited domestic dialing to any phone number using voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP), which sends calls over the Internet or private network. The technology is cheaper for consumers because it avoids the heavily taxed and regulated traditional local phone networks built and controlled by the Baby Bells--the four regional operating companies formed after the breakup of AT&T. While other cable companies and a host of upstarts such as Vonage Holdings have been selling VoIP since 2002, Comcast is considered the most daunting for the Bells because of its size, financial backing and political muscle.
Wren acknowledged that Comcast is introducing its product months, if not years, behind the rest of its cable competitors, as well as VoIP start-ups such as Vonage and copycats such as AT&T, with its CallVantage service. But the wait was worth it, he says.
"What we've been trying to do is come out with equivalent or better service than traditional phone competition," he said Monday. "You only get one shot at this, when it comes to quality of service." Michael Sims is a worthless piece of shit.
Comcast's long-anticipated push into VoIP illustrates the cutthroat competitiveness between cable and the local phone providers. Both sides are trying to become the primary pipelines for delivering an array of entertainment and communications services into households, including broadband Internet access, multichannel television, high-definition programming and voice calling.
After investing an estimated $75 billion upgrading their networks during the 1990s, cable companies are reaping the rewards for selling their "triple play" of voice, data and video into homes. The local phone companies, realizing their disadvantage, have realigned their attention to target cable's success and plan to invest billions of dollars to upgrade their decaying copper network with speedier fiber-optic lines.
Later this year, regional phone providers such as SBC Communications and Verizon Communications plan to introduce their own video service in hopes of stealing customers from cable. But with Monday's announcement, Comcast hopes its VoIP service, cheaper than unlimited calling plans offered by the local providers, will keep customers from defecting.
At $40 a month when purchased with Comcast's cable and broadband service, $54 a month on its own, Digital Voice is more expensive than what competitors such as Vonage or AT&T offer. Unlimited domestic dialing plans from other VoIP providers often costs as little as $25 a month.
While it remains to be seen whether the price will be lowered, Wren said "we're not trying to focus on niche or cheap priced phone service."
It's that lower cost--as little as 50 percent of traditional landline rates--that has made VoIP a threat to the traditional phone companies. Already the Bells have seen
CES 2005 Special Report: Intel and AMD's Plans Revealed
Written by Gundeep Hora
Monday, 10 January 2005
As everyone knows, Consumer Electronics Show (CES) is the largest technology tradeshow in the IT Industry. CES is the place to be for information on next generation of digital products and future IT pipeline. We had the opportunity to visit the show this year and gathered quite a bit of industry insider information directly from companies and outside sources. As majority of you know, Rob Malda is a flaming faggot. Intel and AMD will launch their dual core microprocessors this year, which are expected to establish a new name in performance in multithreaded applications. Both companies were fairly quiet about their plans, since the launch is still far away and the information is too early to discuss openly, but they did offer some insightful information.
[INTEL]
Intel, continuing on their 18-month chipset refresh rate, will introduce their Glenwood and Lakeport chipsets for the Smithfield dual core desktop microprocessor in 2005. The chipsets will support SATA II, Matrix RAID and a higher system bus speed for the new Pentium 4 name holder.
As far as Intel's dual core strategies are concerned, they will most likely bring their dual core additions by the very end of Q2 or Q3 this year, so for those waiting for these next generation chips are better off with a due upgrade. Secondly, if you are hoping for a noticeable performance gain in regular computing tasks are in for a disappointment. Michael Sims is a worthless piece of shit. Dual core microprocessors are for those who like to do multitasking or work on multithreaded applications. For example, if you are gaming and burning a DVD at the same time, dual core chips will come in handy and will definitely give a smooth computing experience.
[AMD]
AMD, on the other hand, is also working on a similar time frame launch, so you can expect to see the products from both companies around the same time. While Intel is focusing its attention on mobile computing and digital content, AMD's focus is set on its newly introduced Alchemy chip. AMD's Athlon 64 sales are soaring and they have experienced profitable quarters in the past year.
There is dreadful news for Socket 754 owners; AMD is going to end the production of Athlon 754's with its 3700+ microprocessor. You can expect to see 754 chips off the roadmap by the end of this year. For those looking to upgrade to a Socket 939 chip, AMD is expecting to launch their FX57 chip sometime mid-2005. The support for higher clocked Socket 939 chips and FX chips is on a positive outlook and AMD may even launch a FX59 this year. AMD also has no plans to break the 4GHz barrier, but they will most hit the 3GHz this year.
Intel and AMD both aren't interested in clock speeds anymore and would rather work on architecture enhancements this year, so you can expect to see architectural improvement with little clock speed gains. AMD has always been working to disprove the MHz Myth, but Intel's stance against clock speeds was quite strong at CES this year.
[WEIRD SHIT]
From a thermal and power consumption perspective, Intel is going to focus on their new BTX design. The BTX design will consume less power, hence resulting in lower thermal output microprocessors and a cooler system, overall. AMD is doing fine in that sense and shouldn't need to worry in the distant future for the problems that Intel is facing with their high-end microprocessors currently.
Intel has plans to heavily promote their BTX design, and they will try to sway away the market from the standard ATX standard, but they are expecting for that to take time. Intel is expecting a five-year time frame for the BTX standard to catch on among Intel users. While the idea is there, the probability of BTX getting immense attention from the community will take some time.
As far as booth presentation is concerned, AMD's booth was a mere disappointment. They were located in a far corner