Mixed Signals
Any sufficiently advanced information is indistinguishable from noise
Friday 11 July 2008, 9:57 AM
3G iPhone - the long wait is over. Or is it?
Walking past my local O2 store on the Holloway Road at 7:45 this morning, I clocked around fifty north Londoners queuing outside. They were in good spirits: the sun was shining, the O2 staff were distributing goody bags (containing no iPhones, to much palpable disappointment, but a small selection of fruit, crisps and other snacks), and the fanboi cameraderie was in full effect.
For about a minute, I wondered whether to join in - having a vague feeling of desire for the device itself, and tempted by the idea of concocting an eyewitness account of the whole affair. Sanity soon kicked in - as it normally does when Apple's involved, once you've had the psyops training - and I left them to it.
And then I did some sums. Given that you have to activate your iPhone in-store, a process that can take twenty minutes if previous experience is a guide, and given that there were three shop assistants, a queue of fifty people would take around five hours to clear. That's before you factor in stuff like O2's systems going down if two people glance at it at the same time...
Even as I type, reports are coming in that people are bailing out of the queues because delays are huge. Others say that registration just isn't working. One rumour says that O2's registration system only works with Internet Explorer, and Apple Stores only have Macs. Another says that the credit check system has fallen over. Still another says that stores have a tiny allocation of phones - as in three - but haven't been telling the queuers.
Here's a helpful hint: for some reason, nobody's queuing outside the Carphone Warehouse shop ten doors up from the O2 store on the Holloway Road. At the 2G launch, this trick could net you a iPhone in minutes, at the height of the fever...
Thursday 10 July 2008, 8:24 AM
HP's memristor edges closer to chipdom - and beyond
More news about HP's new memristor technology, from EE Times. Memristors are a new class of electronic device that change their resistance according to how much current goes through them - and, crucially, maintain that resistance when the current goes away. As the effect works on nanometric scales, this creates the possibility for very dense, very big, very simple memory chips -- a basic technology that gets any tech company salivating.
HP first announced memristors in April this year. It now claims that it's made a lot of progress very quickly, most notably in working out exactly how the things work. The basic idea is quite simple: titanium oxide changes its conductivity depending on how much oxygen is present inside its crystal structure, and vacancies within that structure - places where oxygen could be but isn't - can be moved around by electrical current. Now, HP says that the most interesting and important part of this effect occurs not in the body of the material as first thought, but at the interface between the titanium oxide and the electrodes that move current through it.
So far, so interesting. HP has found this out by learning how to build experimental devices in a way that lets it fine-tune lots of parameters and observe what happens, so it's building up a body of expertise in practical memristory. One early result is that the switching time for the devices is of the order of 50 nanoseconds - slower than dynamic or static memory, but much nicer than flash. This confirms HP's initial thoughts that memristor memory will be a natural contender for the flash market - and the company's saying that prototype chips may be available as soon as next year, which if true would be a world record lab-to-fab time for brand new physics. Normally, twenty years is closer to the mark. HP calls these chips resistive RAM or RRAM, although whether this is pronounced are-ram or with a gutteral roar like a small child imitating a racing car is not yet clear.
But wait - there's more. Because memristors are basically analogue devices, able to hold a wide range of values, they may be particularly apt for modeling analogue computation systems like synapses and self-learning systems such as neural networks. That's five years ahead for working systems, says HP, with another five years for commercialisation.
Got a good feeling about this one.
Wednesday 9 July 2008, 4:28 PM
You might know your IT, but do you know Love Solutions?
Our mobile reportage guru David "I'm in a band, you know" Meyer is, as you know, in a band. Like any good rock star, he's also got solo projects on the boil - one, miniblackhole, being of quite long standing.
Unfortunately for his psyche, his songwriting chops have been infected by all those marketing meetings, Powerpoint presentations and cliche-ridden press releases that he has to endure in the course of his duties. So bad has this contamination become that he found himself writing "Love Solutions" -- a rock song all about love, entirely in managementspracht. It's so twisted, it works.
We've tried to help him work this thing out. In particular, Alper "I've written and shot a movie, you know" Cagatay from our video production department took up his camera and his editing suite, and shot David while he acted out his rock god fantasy.
And now we've put it up on Youtube. In the time-honoured words of experience: David's suffered for his art, and now it's your turn.
Wednesday 9 July 2008, 1:58 PM
Bright new future of multicore, circa 1994
An article in German tech publication c't sheds a bit more light on Larrabee, Intel's much anticipated multicore chip. It's a graphics engine! It's an accelerator! It's going to wipe out nVidia with ray-tracing! It's... a bunch of 1994-vintage Pentiums?
Apparently so. As the article says, in Deutchglish via the fine offices of Google translation, "For the "Visual Computing" and in a later version for High Performance Computing is thought Larrabee, a processor, which has so far received 16 to 24 seeds traded, but probably the same with 32 cores next year debütieren is - and how now penetrated to general surprise, with exactly the most well-known Pentium cores: the Pentium P54C."
The P54C! That was the late 1994 first shrink of the original Pentium (to 600nm from 800nm), with 3 million transistors and 16k L1 cache. Doing the sums, a 32-core Larrabee based on a version "geshrinkt to 45nm" would still only have around 100 million transistors, or roughly what you'd expect from a high-end 2003 vintage processor.
It's not that simple. The c't article goes on to say that the cores will be 64 bit compatible and that the vector processing stuff will be 512 bits wide - and that the chip, while probably topping out at around 2 teraflops, will be guzzling some 300 watts.
Which isn't that bad for 32 Pentium cores. Let's hope they've fixed the FDIV bug.
Wednesday 9 July 2008, 8:46 AM
Vista 'really good, really' says MS. 'Like we care?' says world
It's not really a mid-life crisis, not really. But eighteen months after Vista appeared - and eighteen months before Windows 7 - Vista has bought a metaphoric red sports car and a new pair of tight jeans, and is getting ready to go on the pull.
Microsoft is rallying the troops with its Worldwide Partner Conference getting told “Today we are drawing a line and are going to start telling the real story” about Vista. It's compatible, no matter what people think. It's secure, no matter what people think. It's so reliable and easy to use that people who buy Business and Ultimate pre-installed on new PCs will get free coaching and support. Pick the ironies out of that one at your leisure.
There's a big new advertising campaign coming, you lucky people. The details are yet to be revealed, but the prime target is the increasingly annoying Apple - which has clearly goaded Microsoft beyond endurance by having an OS that people actually love, having a cross-platform one-message approach that actually works, having content and portable appliance strategies that actually work, and having much, much better adverts. That actually work.
The trouble is, Vista is sunk. The dog is dead. It doesn't actually matter now whether everything Microsoft says about today's Vista is true or not, because Windows 7 is coming tomorrow. And it doesn't matter what Microsoft says about Windows 7 - if it really is basically Vista but better, then why buy Vista now when a better version is on its way? And if it's not really very Vista at all, then why buy Vista now and risk running an orphan OS? You can finesse those arguments any way you like, but since the days of Adam Osborne one of the rules of the game is that announcing a new version of anything sends out the funeral notice for the old.
There will be plenty of sales, of course, because for most people buying new PCs online or on the high street there is no perception of choice. Where people do realise there's a choice, then Apple's winning - and in organisations, over the remaining lifetime of Vista, the choice of not spending any more money for a while on stuff they don't actually need is going to be irresistable. Show me anyone or anything on the planet who actually needs Vista.
Hence MS' new focus on Apple as the enemy: it's the only place it has a hope of holding back the tide. But if the expensive advertising campaign just pitches MS as an Apple-wannabe ("Look! Zune! Windows Mobile! Vista! Live! And they work together for a really cool lifestyle choice!") then I fear we all know how well that'll play against iPod, iPhone and OS X.
The other side of the question is: if you woke up one day as CEO of Microsoft, what would you do to turn that ship around - assuming you couldn't recruit Steve Jobs?
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