I used to do this with a plug-in called Google Browser Sync on Mozilla back in the day. Since then, there’s a Firefox plug-in for Delicious that would help keep things synced up with that bookmark sharing site. But that’s not really what I wanted. I wanted Google Browser Sync, and now I finally have it again, cross platform.
At long last Mac and PC versions of the Google Chrome web browser have the ability to save bookmarks to Google Docs and sync all the changes/additions/deletions to that single central file. I’m so happy I went through and did a huge house cleaning on all my accumulated bookmarks. Soon I will follow-up to find out which ones are dead and get everything ship-shape once again. It’s sad the utility of a program like browser sync is taken away. I assume it was based on arbitrary measures of popularity and success. Google’s stepping down and taking away Browser Sync gave some developers a competitive edge for a while, but I wanted Browser Sync no matter who it was that did the final software development. And now finally I think I have it again.
Why is bookmark syncing useful? The time I’ve spent finding good sources of info on the web can be wasted if all I ever do is Google searches. The worst part is every Google search is an opportunity for Google to serve me AdWords related to my search terms. What I really want is the website that has a particularly interesting article or photo gallery. Keeping bookmarks direct to those websites bypasses Google as the middleman. Better yet, I have a link I can share with friends who need to find a well vetted, curated source of info. This is how it should be and luckily now with Chrome, I have it.
Canon is mucking up the works by creating yet another digital video format for people to adopt. AVHDC, HDV and now this lone MPEG-2 based format. It's getting real confusing to keep up with these attempts to corner the market
Getting back to Apple A4, Steve Jobs incorrectly addressed Apple A4 as a CPU. We’re not sure was this to keep the mainstream press enthused, but A4 is not a CPU. Or we should say, it’s not just a CPU. Nor did PA Semi/Apple had anything to do with the creation of the CPU component.
Interesting info on the Apple A4 System on Chip which is being used by the recently announced Ipad tablet computer. The world of mobile, low power processors is dominated by the designs of ARM Holdings Inc. Similarly ARM is providing the graphics processor intellectual property too. So in the commodity CPU/GPU and System on Chip (SoC) market ARM is the only way to go. You buy the license you layout the chip with all the core components you license and shop that around to a chip foundry. Samsung has a lot of expertise fabricating these chips made to order using the ARM designs. But Apparently another competitor Global Foundries is shrinking its design rules (meaning lower power and higher clock speeds) and may become the foundry of choice. Unfortunately outfits like iFixit can only figure out what chips and components go into an electronics device. They cannot reverse engineer the components going into the A4, and certainly anyone else would probably be sued by Apple if they did spill the beans on the A4’s exact layout and components. But because everyone is working from the same set of Lego Blocks for the CPUs and GPUs and forming them into full Systems on a Chip, some similarities are going to occur.
The heart of the new Apple A4 System on Chip
One thing pointed out in this article is the broad adoption of the same clockspeed for all these ARM derived SoCs. 1Ghz is the clock speed across the board despite differences in manufacturers and devices. The reason being everyone is using the same ARM cpu cores and they are designed to run optimally at the 1Ghz clock rate. So the more things change (meaning faster and faster time to market for more earth shaking designs) the more they stay the same (people adopt commodity CPU designs and become more similar in performance). It will take a big investment for Apple and PA Semiconductor to really TRULY differentiate themselves with a unique and different and proprietary CPU of any type. They just don’t have the time, though they may have the money. So when Jobs tells you something is exclusive to Apple, that may be true for industrial design. But for CPU/GPU/SoC, … Don’t Believe the Hype surround the Apple A4.
NYTimes weighs in on the Apple A4 chip and what it means for the iPad maintaining its competitive advantage. NYTimes gives Samsung more credit than Apple because they manufacture the chip. What they will not speculate on or guess at is ARM Holdings Inc. sale of licenses to it’s Cortex A-9 to Apple. They do hint that the nVidia Tegra CPU is going to compete directly against Apple’s iPad using the A4. However, as Steve Jobs has pointed out more than once, “Great Products Ship”. And anyone else in the market who has licensed the Cortex A-9 from ARM had better get going. You got 60 days or 90 days depending on your sales/marketing projections to compete directly with the iPad.
I use google wave every single day. I start off the day by checking gmail. Then I look at a few news sites to see if anything of interest happened. Then I open google wave: because thats where my business lives. Thats how I run a complicated network of collaborators, make hundreds of decisions every day and organise the various sites that made me $14.000 in december. On how Google Wave surprisingly changed my life – This is so Meta.
I’m glad some people are making use of Google Wave. After the first big spurt of interest, sending invites out to people interest tapered off quickly. I would login and see no activity whatsoever. No one was coming back to see what people had posted. So like everyone else I stopped coming back too.
Compare this also to the Facebook ebb and flow. I notice the NYTimes.com occasionally slagging Facebook with an editorial in their Tech News section. Usually the slagging is conducted by someone who I would classify as a pseudo technology enthusiast (the kind that doesn’t back up their files, then subsequently writes about it in an article to complain about it). Between iPhone upgrades and writing up the latest free web service they occasionally rip Facebook in order to get some controversy going.
But as I’ve seen Facebook has a rhythm of less participation then periods of intense participation. Sometimes it’s lonely, people don’t post or read for months and months. It makes me wonder what interrupts their lives long enough that people stop reading or writing posts. I would assume Google Wave might suffer the same kind of ebb and flow even when used for ‘business’ purposes.
So the question is, does any besides this lone individual on Posterous use Google Wave on a daily business for work purposes?
This is a great description of containers versus codecs when it comes to video files on the web. There are many types of containers and many types of codecs. You can have an AVI file that is encoded in Xvid/DivX. Or you can have a Quicktime file that is encoded in H.264. So which ones do you want to use to ensure the maximum number of people can view your video?
Comment With Intel sending its “Larrabee” graphics co-processor out to pasture late last year – before it even reached the market – it is natural to assume that the chip maker is looking for something to boost the performance of high performance compute clusters and the supercomputer workloads they run. Nvidia has its Tesla co-processors and its CUDA environment. Advanced Micro Devices has its FireStream co-processors and the OpenCL environment it has helped create. And Intel has been relegated to a secondary role.
Intel’s long term graphics accelerator project code-named “Larabee. It’s an unfortunate side effect of losing all that money by time delays on the project that forces Intel now to reuse the processor as a component in a High Performance Computer (so-called Super Computer). The competition have been providing hooks or links into their CPUs and motherboard for auxiliary processors or co-processors for a number of years. AMD notably created a CPU socket with open specs that FPGA’s could slide into. Field Programmable Gate Arrays are big huge general purpose CPUs with all kinds of ways to reconfigure the circuits inside of them. So huge optimizations can be made in hardware that were previously done in Machine Code/Assembler by the compilers for that particular CPU. Moving from a high level programming language to an optimized hardware implementation of an algorithm can speed a calculation up by several orders of magnitude (1,000 times in some examples). AMD has had a number of wins in some small niches of the High Performance Computing market. But not all algorithms are created equal, and not all of them lend themselves to implementation in hardware (FPGA or it’s cousin the ASIC). So co-processors are a very limited market for any manufacturer trying to sell into the HPC market. Intel isn’t going to garner a lot of extra sales by throwing development versions of Larabee out to the HPC developers. Another strike is the dependence on a PCI express bus for communications to the Larabee chipset. While PCI Express is more than fast enough for graphics processing, an HPC setup would prefer a CPU socket adjacent to the general purpose CPUs. The way AMD has designed their motherboards all sockets are on the same motherboard and can communicate directly to one another instead of using the PCI Express bus. Thus, Intel loses again trying to market Larabee in the HPC market. One can only hope that other secret code-name projects like the CPU with 80 cores will see the light of day soon when it makes a difference rather than suffer the opportunity costs of a very delayed launch of Larabee.
Slashdot just posted this article for all to read on the Interwebs
penguinrecorder writes“The Thunder Generator uses a mixture of liquefied petroleum, cooking gas, and air to create explosions, which in turn generate shock waves capable of stunning people from 30 to 100 meters away. At that range, the weapon is relatively harmless, making people run in panic when they feel the sonic blast hitting their bodies. However, at less than ten meters, the Thunder Generator is capable ofcausing permanent damage or killing people.”
I went directly to the article itself and read the contents of it. And it was very straight forward, more or less indicating this new shockwave gun was an adaptation of the propane powered “scare crows” used to budge and shift birds from farm fields in Israel.
TEL AVIV – An Israeli-developed shock wave cannon used by farmers to scare away crop-threatening birds could soon be available to police and homeland security forces around the world for nonlethal crowd control and perimeter defense.
I think Mark Pauline and Survival Research Labs beat the Israeli’s to the punch inventing the so-called cannon:
Prior to Mark Pauline and Survival Research Labs, the German military in WW2 adapted the pulse jet for the V-1 Buzz bomb. In short, a German terror weapon has indirectly become the product of an Israeli defense contractor. Irony Explodes. The V1 Buzz bomb was influenced by a French inventor Georges Marconnet. Everything Old is new again in the war on terror. Some good ideas never die, they just get re-invented like the wheel.
I remember reading announcements of the 64GB SDXC card format coming online from Toshiba. And just today Samsung has announced it’s making a single chip 64GB flash memory module with a built-in memory controller. Apple’s iPhone design group has been big fans of the single chip large footprint flash memory from Toshiba. They bought up all of Toshiba’s supply of 32GB modules before they released the iPhone 3GS last Summer. Samsung too was providing the 32GB modules to Apple prior to the launch. Each Summer newer bigger modules are making for insanely great things that the iPhone can do. Between the new flash memory recorders from Panasonic/JVC/Canon and the iPhone what will we do with the doubling of storage every year? Surely there will be a point of diminishing return, where the chips cannot be made any thinner and stacked higher in order to make these huge single chip modules. I think back to the slow evolution and radical incrementalism in the iPod’s history going from 5GB’s of storage to start, then moving to 30GB and video! Remember that? the Video iPod @ 30GBytes was dumbfounding at the time. Eventually it would top out at 120 and now 160GBytes total on the iPod classic. At the rate of change in the flash memory market, the memory modules will double in density again by this time next year, achieving 128GBytes for a single chip modules with embedded memory controller. At that density a single SDHC sized memory card will also be able to hold that amount of storage as well. We are fast approaching the optimal size for any amount of video recording we could ever want to do and still edit when we reach the 128 Gbyte mark. At that size we’ll be able to record 1080p video upwards of 20 hours or more on today’s video cameras. Who wants to edit much less watch 20 hours of 1080p video? But for the iPhone, things are different, more apps means more fun. And at 128GB of storage you never have to delete an app, or an single song from your iTunes or a single picture or video, just keep everything. Similarly for those folks using GPS, you could keep all the maps you ever wanted to use right onboard rather than download them all the time thus providing continuous navigation capabilities like you would get with a dedicated GPS unit. I can only imagine the functionality of the iPhone increasing as a result of the increased storage 64GB Flash memory modules would provide. Things can only get better. And speaking of better, The Register just reported today some future directions.
There could be a die process shrink in the next gen flash memory products. There are also some opportunities to use slightly denser memory cells in the next gen modules. The combination of the two refinements might provide the research and design departments at Toshiba and Panasonic the ability to double the density of the SDXC and Flash memory modules to the point where we could see 128GBytes and 256GBytes in each successive revision of the technology. So don’t be surprised if you see a Flash memory module as standard equipment on every motherboard to hold the base Operating System with the option of a hard drive for backup or some kind of slower secondary storage. I would love to see that as a direction netbook or full-sized laptops might take.
Nobody is the final authority when it comes to monitoring and privacy. No surer example exists than when Stalin died, the rules changed. When the East German state ended the Stazi went away. When the U.S. invaded Iraq, Saddam Hussein fled from power. Those in power try to cleanse their country of all who oppose them (the wrong-thinkers). Then their power evaporates, they vanish and all the rules change again. The same is true of Bush 43.
George W. Bush was here, now he’s gone. So why not dismantle all that surveillance gear the NSA put into all the network facilities at AT&T, Sprint? The rules have changed, you don’t need to acquiesce to the current administration, because it’s not the same people making the same demands. The rules have changed. Yet as world events on Christmas day have proved there’s always a Jaws-like shark fin rising and falling out there in the ocean. The threat is very close by and we have to be ever vigilant. So the watchers claim of authority is re-established with each and every tragic episode. Still, is a single incident cause for the continued erosion of our rights to privacy? Given the hair-trigger responses we try to architect and instant reprisals it’s obvious to me the current environment proves it can never end, under the current structure. So in order to stop the erosion, we need to change our thinking about the threat. True no one wants to be fearful of flying wherever they may go. And when they go, they don’t want to be faced with having to kill a fellow passenger in order to save themselves, but that’s the situation we have mentally put ourselves in.
The only way out is to change our thinking. Change how we think about the danger, the threat and you change how much of our freedoms we are willing to give up to respond to the threat. And maybe we can get back to where we once belonged.
So where is the technology that can store our high-definition home cinema collection on a single chip? Or every book we would ever want to read or refer to? Flash can’t do that. In labs across the world, though, an impressive array of technologies is lining up that could make such dreams achievable.
RAM memory used to reign supreme in Dual Inline Packages (DIPS)
I used to follow news stories on new computer memory technology on the IEEE.com website. I didn’t always understand all the terms and technologies, but I did want to know what might be coming on the market in a couples of years. Magnetic RAM seemed like a game changer as did Ferro-Electric RAM. Both of them like Flash could hold their contents without the computer being turned on. And in some ways they were superior to Flash in that they read/write cycle didn’t destroy the memory over time. Flash is known to have a useful fixed lifespan before it wears out. According to the postscript in this article at New Scientist flash memory can sustain between 10,000 and 100,000 read/write cycles before it fails. Despite this, flash memory doesn’t seem to be going away anytime soon, and begs the question where are my MRAMs and FeRAM chips?
Maybe my faith in MRAM or Magnetic RAM was misplaced. I had great hopes for it exactly because so much time had been spent working on it. Looks like they couldn’t break the 32MB barrier in terms of the effective density of the MRAM chips themselves. And FeRAM is also stuck at 128MB effectively for similar reasons. It’s very difficult to contain or restrict the area over which the magnetism acts on the bits running through the wires on the chip. It’s all about too much crosstalk on the wires.
This article mentions something called Racetrack Memory. And what about Racetrack Memory so called RRAM? It reminds me a lot of what I read about the old Sperry Univac computers that used Mercury Delay Lines to store 512bits at a time. Only now instead of acoustic waves, it’s storing actual electrons and reading them in series as needed. Cool stuff, and if I had to vote for which one is going to win, obviously Phase Change and Racetrack look like good prospects right now. I hope both of them see the light of day real soon now.
Carpet Bomberz Inc. 