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  • Moore’s Law to take a breather • The Register

    Back in the days of Byte magazine still being published, there was a lot of talk and speculation about new technology to create smaller microchips. Some manufacturers were touting Extreme UV, some thought X-rays would be necessary. In the years since then a small modification of existing manufacturing methods was added.

    “Immersion” lithography, or exposing lithography masks using water as the means of transmission rather than air was widely adopted to shrink things down. Dipping everything into optically clear water helps keep the UV light from scattering, the way it would if it were travelling through air or a simple vacuum. So immersion has become widespread, adding years to the old technology. Now even the old style UV processes are hitting the end of their useful life times.And Intel is at last touting Extreme UV as the next big thing.

    Note this article from April 22, 2008. Intel was not at all confident in how cost effective Extreme UV would be for making chips on it’s production lines. The belief is EUV will allow chips to shrink from 32 nanometers down to the next lower process design rules. According to the article that would be the 22nm level, and would require all kinds fo tricks to achieve. Stuff like double-patterning, phase-shifting, and pixellated exposure masks in addition to immersion litho. They might be able to tweak the lens material for the exposure source, they might be able to tweak the refractive index of the immersion liquid. However the cost of production lines and masks to make the chips is going to sky-rocket. Brand new chip fab plants are still on the order of $1Billion+ to construct. The number of years the cost of those fabrication lines can be spread out (amortization) is not going to be long enough. So it looks like the commoditization of microchips will finally settle in. We will buy chips for less and less per 1,000, until they are like lightbulbs. It is very near the end of an era as Moore’s law finally hits the wall of physics.

    Diminishing Returns of process shrinks

    iSuppli is not talking about these problems, at least not today. But what the analysts at the chip watcher are pondering is the cost of each successive chip-making technology and the desire of chip makers not to go broke just to prove Moore’s Law right.

    via iSuppli: Moore’s Law to take a breather • The Register.

  • Sugar Labs-Making computers useful

    Image representing One Laptop Per Child as dep...
    Image via CrunchBase

    I’m enjoying reading about Walter Bender‘s project to make software that makes the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) or XO-1 Laptop more useful to a wider range of people. What’s even more uplifting is the same software will run on older PC and Mac hardware. So don’t recycle that PC, just install Sugar Labs–Sugar on a Stick and continue using that PC until the hard drive finally fails or the display gives out. No need to endlessly upgrade your hardware, just keep on truckin’ with Sugar Labs. For schools with budget cuts and families with older computers Sugar on a Stick is going to be a godsend.

    The Sugar on a Stick environment is self-contained and sized just small enough to fit on a 1GB USB Flash drive. You can boot into the Sugar environment, run all the applications, save our data on to the Flash drive. Then when you are done just reboot and remove the flash drive. The PC goes back to its original Operating System, no fuss no muss. Considering the amount of computer waste shipped overseas to be salvaged, keeping the computer running with Sugar might be a greener alternative.

    Sugar on a Stick provides a coherent and consistent computing experience. It reduces costs by providing flexibility in hardware choices, allowing schools to keep their existing investment in hardware. Learners can benefit from the increased household ownership of computers; by bringing Sugar on a Stick home, every student has a consistent, comparable computing environment that parents can share in as well. It also provides off-line access to applications and content as not every learner has Internet access at home.

    Sugar Labs—learning software for children.

    Related articles

  • links for 2009-06-24

  • vReveal uses GPU to accelerate video fixes

    Before and After

    There’s a new video trend in personal home video. Companies are lining up to provide aftermarket tools to process and provide corrections to camera phone video. Pure Digital’s Flip! camera line has some tools available to do some minor cutting to video clips and publish it to sharing websites. All of which presents an entrepreurial opporunity to provide pay for tools to help improve poorly shot video.

    Some tools are provided within video editing suites like Apples iMovie (it corrects camera shake). Now on the PC there are two new products, one of which is designed to take advantage of the nVidia GPU acceleration of parallel programming. The product is called vReveal

    While vReveal works with Windows XP or Vista (and not with Macs), it will make its enhancements much faster if the machine contains a recent graphics processing card from Nvidia, Dr. Varah said. Nvidia is an investor and a marketing partner with vReveal; a specific list of cards is at vReveal’s Web site.

    via Novelties – Making a Fuzzy Video Come Into Focus – NYTimes.com.

  • Patriot Torqx Vs. Intel

    I’ve seen some claims that newer SSDs coming out are implementing the SATA TRIM command. This development is hailing a new era in SDD performance, something we have all wished for since the introduction of SSDs back in 2005. In the last 4 years, performance gains have usually been obtained by using RAID controllers within the SSDs. Worse yet, some SATA disk controllers on the SSDs were known to be total dogs when it comes to performance. Enter the hero of our story: Indilinx

    Indilinx decided after multiple requests to enter the market and show that SSDs are worthy of some real product development. Patriot is the one of the first manufacturers to adopt the Indilinx disk controller. Given announcements from Microsoft recently over the addition of full OS support for the SATA TRIM command and now the Indilinx controller,…

    One can only hope that Windows 7 will allow SSDs to finally equal or surpass their HDD counterparts. Finger crossed, hoping the Indilinx takes the market by storm and Microsoft will fully embrace and improve its support for the TRIM command

    Recent SSD from Torq vs. Intel

    Despite the huge performance gains, two major things plague SSDs:

    – Poor quality flash memory controller, performance

    – Cost

    Patriot Memory’s new Torqx SSD addresses both–more so the former.

    via Patriot Memory’s Torqx SSD Vs. Intel’s X25-M – Tom’s Hardware.

    WordPress Tags: SSD,TRIM,Indilinx

  • iPhone ships w/Toshiba 32GB flash memory

    Going back a few weeks I dug up this article about Toshiba’s groundbreaking 32nm/32GB stacked flash memory module.

    32GB Flash Memory

    Toshiba on Monday revealed that it has started shipping its 32 nanometer NAND flash memory ahead of schedule. Originally planned for the fall, the higher-density storage is already being sampled today and should be in mass production by July. The process allows a single, thin 32-gigabit (4GB) chip and, with eight stacked chips, will allow 32GB of memory in a single package.

    via Electronista | Toshiba ships 32nm, 32GB flash memory early.

    At the time it was not announced what manufacturers were going to use the new chip. Some speculators were thinking Apple might be using it in their top of the line 32GB iPhone 3GS. And according to all the teardown accounts iFixit & Rapid Repair, the Toshiba chip is front and center on the top of the line model.

    iPhone 3GS ships w/Toshiba chip
    iPhone 3GS ships w/Toshiba chip

    I think its great when innovations like this can make into shipping products immediately. While the cost is prohibitive for many, you can rest assured you are getting the cutting edge, the bleeding edge of technology when you buy Apple products. Why I even remember when the first video iPods with 30GB Hard drives came out. Nobody thought you would ever need that amount of space for all your music, so Apple introduced video as another reason to buy an iPod. Now we have 32GB available on the iPhone. It just gets better and better since Oct. of 2005 when that first 30GB ipod was reviewed.

  • ‘Wait For Me’ : Moby @ NPR Music

    I am a fan of David Lynch. I saw the movie Blue Velvet once on MTV of all places. It wasn’t in its entirety but it did have all the adult content. It was more frightening than any horror movie I saw up until or after that time. Because its horror is so palpable. It is as real as me sitting here typing or getting up to go to the bathroom or driving to work. Its plainness and realness are what raises my level of paranoia 100 percent.

    As a person David Lynch seems very mild, and he’s pretty happy generally and kind of nostalgic. He put up a website some years back to allow fans to contribute to his causes. Meditation is a big deal for him, and he’s trying to setup a large scale school for teaching tascendental meditation. So it’s always a shock or slightly unsettling to see him speak about something he hates. David Lynch hates Product Placement and knows that watching a movie on a telephone is much worse than seeing on a big movie screen. I haven’t really thought about David Lynch very recently. But a link to an NPR website reviewing new music from the Artis Moby caught my attention.

    Moby
    Moby

    NPR.org, June 15, 2009 – Moby has just made his best record in 10 years — at least I think so. The new record by the DJ, singer, bassist, keyboardist, guitarist and all-around renaissance man, Wait for Me, is filled with beauty, sadness and celebration.

    via Exclusive First Listen: Moby, ‘Wait For Me’ : NPR Music.

    Moby had said in an interview he was inspired by an interview done by BAFTA for it’s David Lean Lecture Series. Moby felt Lynch was saying being creative was more important than the market for the work being created. Which led me to finding the original video and transcript of the interview:

    David Lynch from the BAFTA David Lean Lecture:

    “Everybody probably knows that success is just as dangerous as failure, maybe more. You second guess yourself from then on because you’re afraid to fall. Failure? Terrible at first but then, oh man, total freedom. There is nowhere to go but up, and it’s a very good thing.”

    Moby asked David Lynch to make a video for one of the music tracks. Here’s the link to video on pitchfork:

    http://pitchfork.com/tv/#/musicvideo/966-moby-shot-in-the-back-of-the-he…

    So given this interesting combination of thoughts and ideas and inspiration all I can say is I’m so happy the web allows people to find those little seeds to start big fires burning. Lynch is right. Creativity is the thing. Or as Lynch likes to say the little fish that allow you to catch the really deep, abstract big fish. I too have received inspiration from finding the original album posted on NPR.org. I listened to the whole thing all the way through rather than a track at a time. Moby designed this to be an old style ‘album’ experience and he handcrafted it, a very personal work. I like it. I like it a lot. It’s fantastic. Run out and buy it, or download it or something. Do it. Do it now!

  • TidBITS: Welcome to Internet U, via Video

    Doug McLean

    I was raised on the most successful initiatives from Public Television, or ETV as it was previously known (E standing for Educational of course). Sesame Street, 3-2-1 Contact, Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, and Reading Rainbow were my bread and butter as a kid.

    via TidBITS Just for Fun: Welcome to Internet U, via Video.

    I couldn’t agree more I too grew up with Educational Television as a child. In fact in the Northeast corner of South Dakota there was a huge transmitter just outside our little town. It was a PBS tower and sometimes that was the only station we could get. In between days at school and dinner time I watched re-runs of Gilligan’s Island or old Hanna Barbera cartoons on Captain 11 on KELO-TV. Those were the days. I used to thoroughly hate the adult shows my parents watched like Masterpiece Theatre. They must have seen every episode of Upstairs, Downstairs three times. But then I too loved watching repeats of Mr. Roger’s Neighborhood and Sesame Street. I was one of the chief beneficiaries of Newton Minow’s speech to the National Association of Brodacasters back in 1961. For me television might have been a vast wasteland, but there were some bright shining spots along the way.

  • links for 2009-06-17

  • Backup Your Computer Hard Drive, right now

    via: Virginia Hernan@NYTimes.com

    A few weeks ago, my laptop suffered a fall onto linoleum that made its congenitally nervous hard drive more nervous even than usual. Fortunately, days later, the drive turned miraculously tranquil, efficient. Its anxieties disappeared, as if by magic. There was no freezing or whirring. I wrote some e-mail messages, surfed the Web and organized some photos before shutting things down.

    There is no sadder admission by someone who considers themselves a competent IT Professional, than to say, “I resemble that.” I too suffered a Hard Drive mishap, caused by my own ignorance while upgrading my Mac from OS X 10.3 to OS X 10.4. The problem lay in an article I read on a Mac Enthusiast website that indicated there was a new user account migration utility built-in to the new installer on 10.4. So rather than run the Archive and Install option, which would leave the old operating system and all its files, I chose Erase and Install. Why? My mis-reading of the article on the enthusiast website led me to believe I could Erase and Install and then watch the User Migration Utility magically lauch itself. It would pull over my user folder and all the Applications installed on the machine originally. Leaving me with much less work to do once the OS was installed. Past experience proved that reinstalling all your old software takes forever, and I was trying to avoid that.

    Joe Kissell
    Taking Control of Mac OS X 10.4

    via: TidBITS : Evaluating the Tiger Installation Process.

    The key to this new way of thinking is Migration Assistant (the same tool that Apple provides to facilitate moving files from an old Mac to a new one). You don’t have to run this program separately; all its capabilities are integrated into Setup Assistant under the auspices of “File Transfer.”

    So you can imagine to my horror as the erase and install was progressing, the Migration Assistant was not popping up asking me what I wanted to do. And by then it was too late. The Erasure was already wiping the drive or at least setting all the flags on all the files so that they appeared to be open, write-enabled sectors on the Hard Drive. And I didn’t have a full backup of the drive contents before the install. That was my biggest mistake, considering now I’m very familiar with disk cloning. I too have learned the hard lessons of self-inflicted hard drive mishaps. You should take heed of all these warnings too. Put down that iPhone, turn off that TV get on Amazon and buy yourself an external Hard drive and backup, backup, backup.

    Data Robotics-DROBO
    Data Robotics-DROBO