« Computer News from 2001 »

Happy Yule

17th November
Yeah, Microsofts XBox console is officially released. And...

Ten times faster, ten times sooner!
20GHz or bust! Read how Intel plans to break more speed records
(Article by Patrick Houston, Editorial Director, AnchorDesk)

Windows XP reviewed [link to article dead]
Can't say I'll be installing XP in a great hurry, but if you want to read a review...

"Windows XP is more than just a pretty face. This top-to-bottom overhaul of the Windows operating system has something for everyone from families to business users."
Read the review by Serdar Yegulalp, ZDNet Reviews.


11th September 2001, the day the world changed
Anything I can or would add this month pales into insignificance. It truly is one of those things you know you'll remember for the rest of your life.

I was typing away, updating the code for this site when my wife called me downstairs for a news-flash. "Come quick, a plane has crashed into the World Trade Tower!" At first it was just like, my god, look at the mess. Then to watch as the second plane ploughed in...

I felt like someone had walked over my grave. All I could think, over and over again is "This is no accident, this will start the third world war!" Then to watch the day unfold with a third plane crashing into the Pentagon, a fourth crashing in Pennsylvania. I was just flitting back and forth between the television and computer, getting updates via chat rooms. Like many others, I know people who live and work in the New York, even one who was in the first building at the time. Luckily he only suffered a dislocated shoulder, but it brings it home at the same.

Well, I've spent the rest of this month following the aftermath of this event and my first instinct remains with me, despite America not going in gung-ho. Personally, I've always steered well clear of religion and of politics. I forget who and even when but as an over-simplication it was explained to me thus:
"Thou shalt not kill... Believe and do as I say or I'll kill you!"

The following lines I've written and re-written, until my eyes blurred. In the end I have decided to keep my thoughts to myself. I will say this though, I have children and I'm concerned!   I genuinely believe that if any action taken does not include active support from Muslim nations (and I'm not talking arm twisting here) then the world will go to hell in a handbasket.

I have this daft theory. Everyone will turn and misquote / selectively quote various scriptures and the likes of Nostrodamus and, with much wringing of hands, proclaim it was fore-ordained. Nuts! It's like statistics and clouds. Statistics are only as honest as the people taking the sensus to prove what they want to prove. Clouds ? "Doesn't that cloud look like a teapot" No! "Look, there's the spout, that little bobbly bit, that's the lid..." Eventually the other person will see a teapot.   Anyway, what it comes down to is everyone believes a war will happen, it will.   In this case it may happen because the poor beggers in the Middle East believe what their religion leaders decide is the truth. I can only hope that folk see sense.


What happens when hard-drive technology hits its size limit?
Actually, it already has! Not to worry there's a new spec coming out called ATA-6 which will allow drives of up to 144 petabytes (144,000,000 Gigabytes or 1,000 terabytes). Only thing is Windows et al, including the upcoming XP are capped at a mere 2.2 terabytes, of storage on a single disk. Not to worry, we won't hit that bridge for, oooh, 2-3 years...

Apology
No, August wasn't THAT dead, I've just been very very busy, what with summer holidays, revising the site and all. I'll catch up and just shove everything into September.

Computers of the future: Made of glass?
"Engineers in Japan have moved one step closer to their goal of building a personal digital assistant directly onto a sheet of glass. If they are successful, your handheld computer could look just like a small glass panel, possibly as early as 2003"
It's all about beggering about with a melting point and manufacturing method of the glass, along with the substrates to allow electrons to move more freely. Take a peek at the future.


Happy Birthday PC Web...

Wednesday 12 August 1981, IBM released its first PC - powered by a 4.77MHz Intel 8088 and shipping with MS-DOS 1.0 pre-installed.

A decade after that august day (pun intented), on Tuesday 6th August 1991, Tim Berners-Lee first published software for building and viewing Web sites.

This August, while our children and grandchildren fight for turns downloading broadband streamed cartoons on their 1,600Mhz game machines, we (greying techies) should sit down and wonder where all the days went, for the World Wide Web has had it's tenth anniversary and the venerable PC is celebrating its 20th birthday.

Intel i845 in two weeks
The SDRAM i845 "Brookdale" chipset is now complete and should begin volume shipments in two weeks, Apparently there are 250 motherboards designed the new P4 chipset. The DDR 845 is still expected to ship early next year.


Taking the 10 Gigabit Ethernet road [link to article dead]
Grins at the recalled joys over "Lap-linking" 20Mb over customer. In the current world the upcoming 10 Gigabit Ethernet standard, due for final ratification early 2002, in looking to be used not just in the wide area network (Wan) and metropolitan area network (Man) services, but will creep into enterprise networks and become a consideration for IT network managers.


TELUS speeds up high-speed Internet access roll-out in Alberta and B.C.
Over 95 % of all homes and businesses in 38 communities to have ADSL access by 2003.
*Smiles happily to himself*


U.K. Subscribers Choose Speed Over Price
Connection speed and access to the Internet is more important to U.K. Internet users than subscription costs, customer service, or even e-mail services, according to a survey by J.D. Power and Associates.


No more sand* in your chips?
US boffin enables high speed, non-volatile CPUs. Easy-to-apply 'high dieletric constant' material found.
Motorola has already licenced this new techology which replaces Silicon Dioxide (essential posh sand) with a new material called Perovskite oxide. Needless the say this new super-efficient insulator will allow even smaller, faster and cheaper chips.


URL or UR ILL ?
This was in the "Daily Mirror's" Internet section so I'll bite!
Amusingly enough, a recent game - Gadget Tycoon - has you manufacturing roller stakes, robots, and... toilets that analyse your business and email it to your GP / doctor.

Well, apparently the Internet loo is a reality.

"Sensors in the bowl chemically analyse your movements for any irregularities. If they pick up something that points to a medical condition, the Twyford VIP (Versalite Interactive Pan) will email your doctor with a diagnosis and automatically line up an appointment."

Apparently, while still in it's prototype stage, it is to be used in all seriousness by the Chinese Swimming team in the 2004 Olympics to test for drugs and such.


Itanium - one a penny, two a penny - Not!
Bouncing off The Register we get the current prices (ex sales tax) for buying the new Itanium processors. The prices are per 1,000, naturally.

• 800 MHz w/ 4M cache (.18) $4227
• 800 MHz w/ 2M cache (.18) $1980
• 733 MHz w/ 4M cache (.18) $4227
• 733 MHz w/ 2M cache (.18) $1177

Intel to make 'significant' roadmap changes
Intels new roadmap basically pushes the Piii a little faster and then erases it off the market, pushing the P4 to 2.2Ghz and beyond in the coming months instead.   The Celeron is to be retained as the budget chip, reaching and passing the 1Ghz mark somewhere around year end.
See the other related story in The Register and Intels roadmap


Digital Dentistry
 - A sad but true tale of woe and discovery, and the terrors of parenting!

I bent over to kiss my daughter the other day and at that exact moment she decided to leap up. Front teeth vs skull...
Erins trots off saying "You banged my head daddy", I'm on the floor in agony.   Anyway I made the necessary visit to my local dentist and asked for an X-Ray and once over. The dentist in question, (actually a lovely man) says "Oh dear, that is swollen", looks at last years x-ray and says it seems fine!!!   So, I took the prescription for the cure all to reduce the swelling and went for a second opinion.

I point out at this time that I'm naturally wary of dentists because as I child I was under an extremely disreputable and sadistic dentist by the name of Dr Marshall. Every child in the area had a mouthfull of mercury amalgam, as the ( ) was making a fortune conning the parents and government out of a fortune by drilling and filling perfectly good teeth. The parents are all saying "He's a dentist, he knows best" and the kids were all dragging nails across the door, cartoon style, to avoid going inside.

Anyway, this other dentist, one I'd visited before and knew to be extremely professional, takes my word at face value and books me right in and does the x-ray.
  Tada!  
Now just "does it" but uses a high tech computerised digital x-ray machine. Now I've seen all sorts of computers and medical wonders including the multi-million pound CAT scanners, but this x-ray scanner impressed the hell out of me. Dr Burroughs takes the x-ray and "bushak" it's there on the screen in glorious colour. Panning and zooming into the damaged area. No waiting for the slides to be processed, relying on a miniscule negative miniscule.

The tooth is question, fortunately, was a crown. It turns out, the first dentist used metal instead of the better ceramic cement and used a post that was too short, too fat and, incidentally, set at the wrong angle. The net result is that I had a fractured root and when the tooth was removed, due to the metal cement, I lost part of the bone and a little of my gum.   Fortunately this dentist is good enough to repair the damage, hopefully. If the post previously used had been the correct length, even a little longer, the damage would have been far worse and irrepairable...

The moral here is if you are'nt happy with your consultants opinion, always, always get a second opinion. And if your dentist has'nt got one of those gorgeous digital x-ray machines, find one that has. It may well mean going to a private (=expensive) practise, but it's worth every penny.

I'll get the address and maybe the url for the manufacturers of this wonderful device and post it anon.

IBM's fairy dust to offer 400Gb+ drives
Using what it quaintly terms "Pixie dust", or to use it's scientific name, the element ruthenium they are able to quadrupel storage capacities with relatively little manufacturing overhead.

The technology, known as "antiferromagnetically coupled (AFC) media" is a three atom thick multilayer coating that will allow up to 100 billion bits per square inch by 2003.

One day all drives will be made like this - but they will need at least a year to begin to catch up IBM. Apparently the giants executive decided to let the cat out the bag and give their rivals details of this new AFC technology, figuring they would get the drives and see what makes them tick eventually anyway. Kinda makes Maxtors announcement to 137Gb drives "later this year" a bit limp, eh.


Microsoft Windows XP - eXtra Painful ?
The new OS, due to officially ship on October 25, needs...

• a 300MHz or faster processor
• 128MB or more of RAM ("64MB minimum supported; may limit performance and some features")
• 1.5GB of free hard disk space
• An 800 by 600 or higher-resolution display

At least the latter is a standard, but how many corporates and home users are looking at the upgrade costs for Microsofts latest bloatware and thinking "Sod that for a game of soldiers".

That list puts the realistic specs at 256Mb memory and a 600Mhz+ processor with a 17" monitor as a tolerable starting point...


Microsoft gets philanthropic - Not !
Microsoft plans to pull the plug of popular free email newsletter service ListBot. in order to encourage small businesses to use its paid service, List Builder. The current 100,000 or so users can look elsewere from this August...

... Or they can pay Microsoft $149 a year to use what is essential the same service under another name!

Bit of a sod really as a large number of the newsletters I get originate from Listbot.

Why can't Microsoft do something useless like an all encompassing Spam killer. I don't need Viagra, I don't need mortgages from some jock in Wisconsin, I can't read Turkish, I don't for a second believe the hundreds of offers promising I'll "get rich quick", just send $50...
And as for the other offers.   *shakes head*   These people are terminally stupid!


IBM preps 210GHz chip techno logy
Primarily aimed at the comms market, initially at least, the chips are expected within two to years. This is done by using a silicon germanium (SiGe) compound, rather than regular chip silicon, with the transistor's internal workings mounted vertically rather than horizontally, as they are now.

*Grins*   Didn't I just say chips would have to go 3D. It's a start.


Dah, .Com is sooo last week...
There another thirty others if you so care, these being :

.agent
.arts
.auction
.chat
.church
.club
.family
.free
.game
.gmbh
.golf
.hola
.inc
.kids
.law
.llc
.llp
.love
.ltd
.med
.mp3
.school
.scifi
.shop
.soc
.sport
.tech
.travel
.video
.xxx

New Chipsets from Nvidia, Intel To Shake Up Desktop Market
I've followed these two story lines with vague interest for several weeks, so I thought I'd give the story a plug.   Basically, it comes down to this:

Intel is (very belatedly) going to released a Pentium 4 motherboard design to support PC133 SDRAM sticks over Rambus.   And this excites us why !?   For all intents and purposes, the P4 is a comparative luggard due to the way it is optimised. Add that to the fact the (trade) price for P4 with 256Mb Rambus memory is under £200 (before sales tax) and that we have no pricing for the proposed i845 "Brookdale" chipset boards, well...
*shrugs*

The AMD / Nvidia this is likely far more interesting. You've heard of Microsofts world beating console, the X-Box (*cough*). Well in a nutshell this integrated graphics box is also being planned for released as a low cost PC solution. Read *blistering* graphics for the sub £500 mark for the christmas market.
Any queer price fluctuations aside, I'll put my butt on the line and offer this spec for year end...

• Case - £15
• 128Mb PC133 Memory £20
• Nvidia nForce / AMD motherboard with a 1Ghz AMD Athlon £150
• 40Gb HD £55
• DVD-ROM £25
• 17" Monitor £100
• Keyboard, mouse, FDD etc £20
• Total ex sales tax £385 (Retailing circa £499+)

This, I believe is a fair approximation based on current retail prices (unless you shop in the high street!!!)
As a rough guide, a similar system today (one off trade price), without the integraded Nvidia card is circa £385 too.
The GeForce2 are currently around

• £45 for the MX version
• £95 for the full GeForce2
• £240+ for the GeForce3, depending on brand. (All ex sales tax)

As a guide, the big names on the high street reckon a healthy £165 up to an insane £249 for the "old" GeForce2. The latter price relates to the Creative Labs GeForce2 because, as one source inside Electronic Boutique told me, (allegedly)

"It's daft, we can't reduce the price because they won't give us price protection. They have their nose out of joint because they have'nt got a GeForce3 of their own out to market."

Max Extreme !?
And Maxtors' DiamondMax D536X tips the scales with its new baby offering a healthy 100Gb to a drive.

IBM's new baby leaves stretch marks!
Personally, I've always seen layers as the future for chips and IBM have come up with a novel way of speeding up chips by up to 30% with little manufacturing overhead. Basically is involves "strained silicon" - a base layer with atoms slightly further apart than usual, the silicon laid on top of it is deformed or "strained" as its atoms seek to sit on top of their counterparts. The electrons slip through strained silicon faster because they experience less resistance.

Intel have just gone with making them smaller, claiming 20Ghz chips within the next six years. No surprise there then.

For myself, come 2020 when physics rears it's head and says "Your are taking the proverbial..." here's where I believe the next jump occurs:

Modular, onchip, layered multiprocessors. (© Paul Ackerley, 2001 )

Eh ?
Just as building computers in a Lego thing, so processors will be built in 3D.   Maybe I should patent this, eh. Basically, chips will become slightly larger, tremble in height, but increase in power up to one hundred fold, with each chip holding some 100 billion+ transisters with teraflop, even exaflop capabilities for a few hundred dollars a pop.

Putting this into perspective, IBM have announced a supercomputer dedicated the genomes and specifically protein analysis.   "Blue Gene", when completed in 2004, will be capable of performing 1,000-trillion calculations per second, or (1,000 teraflops). That's a quantum leap over the company's current champion, a supercomputer housed at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California that operates at the relatively leisurely pace of 12 trillion calculations per second. Blue Gene is expected to cost $100 million though.


24x CDR's, copied verbatim
For those with time angsts, Verbatim are now churning 24x CDR's, letting you burn a disk in some 3 minutes. Hardly time to make a coffee

DDR double time
Hynix reckons the world's memory makers will churn out 200 million 128Mb DDR chips this year, rising 1.1 billion parts next year, due in part to Intels P4 845 (Brookdale) chipset supporting DDR's. Infineon agree, reckoning DDR will become the choice for PC RAM by 2003, when it will account for more than half of the memory market.

429 million people use the Net
Enjoy a little report by The Register on web statistics.

61" screen enough ?
Beginning July 23rd (next month) NEC will begin Sales of 61-inch Jumbo Plasma Display Monitor, to you John, £20,000.

IE 6 gets smart - not! According to form, the upcoming version of Microsofts Internet Explorer includes "smart tag technology" which basically buggers about with your hyperlinks. "Where do you want to go ?" sang the MS promo. In essence, it will be where you are being re-directed to against your wishes...
"...parses its way through a web page, underlines the words it's been pre-programmed to react to, and inserts its own hyperlinks.   These take you to wherever the smart tag developer wants to take you, entirely without the knowledge or permission of the web site proprietor."

Another Microsoft deviant that ain't getting near by terminal !

Alcatel gets rid of ADSL modem business
*Looks wryly at his modem*
Alcatel has agreed to flog off its ADSL modem business to French consumer electronics company Thomson Multimedia, subject as ever to shareholders and such deciding if they pocket enough from the deal.

BT Openworld not so open...
(22nd May) Mutters in rebellion as, yet again, BT's ADSL service falls flat on its face. This time it's "240 exchanges across the country."   Off the top of my head, that's over a third of the the country...
Turns out it was (circa) 250 of 838 exchanges, the fault being a software glitch. Took three sodding days to sort mind !
*shakes head*

Intels chips just keep falling
According to the ever reliable Register the P4 1.7GHz part will fall within the $350-361 at launch, with the 1.5GHz P4 will be prices at $256 and the 1.4GHz at $193. Expect the PIII's to fall accordingly.


Is BT looking behind the sofa for silver ?
According to various reports in The Register BT is looking to divest 58,000 vans and up to 30 percent it's property to reduce it's massive £30 billion debt.

Given that EVERY phonebill I've had for the last year has been wrong - always in the monster telco's favour - we are talking up to £1,000 a month wrong, well, my heart bleeds for them. Not !
Anyway, here's the links to the stories:
BT's vans up for sale   and   BT to raise £2bn in property sell-off

BT -- BRILLIANT OR BUST?
With BT facing a 50% cut in the obscene profits in gets from leased lines, added to it's other debts and woes, the shareholders are not happy easter bunnies. It is unthinkable that BT might go bust. But Guy Kewney says if you want to see a precedent for the problems facing the corporation, look back at the way the BBC has lost its technology leadership role in the last twenty years.


On the semi-conductor front...
Intel to cut up to 60 per cent off P4 prices in April and May, bringing the P4 chips to below the price of the PIII, which naturally will have to fall too. Personally, from all I've read I would'nt touch the P4's, but there you go. *shrugs*
April to host massive Spring sale

Are MS taking the proverbial ?
A little late news to put a smile on your face at the software giants bare faced cheek. All your data (and biz plans) belong are to Microsoft Hotmail or MSN Messenger user? It's already too late…
All your data (and biz plans) are belong to Microsoft

New Domains approved
The new top level domain names with extensions .BIZ, .INFO, .PRO, and .NAME have just been approved by global internet authorities and will be released soon.


UK has most expensive DSL access in the world
And that is official ! We are up 4 time more expensive than other and have the lowest connection rate in the world, and *shock, horror* this is laid squarely on the dragging feet and machinations of our beloved BT. Bah !

I suppose we are better than the poor sods with American ISP "NorthPoint" as they have apparently gone to the wall, leaving 100,000 DSL customers in the lurch.



Memory prices are still in freefall worldwide
Quantity spot prices for 128MB modules (PC133) fell to :

• $36.81 in North America
• $37.38 in Europe
• $37.15 in Asia.

Newsbyte via The Register



Alcatel releases new USB ADSL modem drivers - including Linux support

The Register comments…



IBM, Sony and Toshiba promise super-chip
They have committed more than $400m to development a processor based on a sub 0.10micron process, which could bring systems more powerful than IBM's super-computer Deep Blue to the home - a teraflop-class consumer CPU within five years.
Related story



As Napster shuts the servers down coders Prepare Son of Napster...
A group of programmers is working on software that will let people share files over the internet securely and anonymously. Apparently the the "Freenet program" is similar to the popular Napster file-sharing software, but uses a different storage and retrieval system which maintains no central index and does not reveal where the files are stored.


And more of the UK's free ISP's begin to buckle and fold...
For sale: ic24   Second hand, two years old, 250,000 users, £25m ono
Supanet mulls sale offer   What does this mean for Time Computers?


Alcatel says 'yes' to Linux USB ADSL support
The Register reported this good news.
The Alcatel SpeedTouch driver will be available shortly.

Chips get cheaper...
As of March 4th, expect more price drops. Given that 1Ghz are already circa £199 (Intel) and £133 (AMD) it's only the graphics cards that are ludicrously priced now.
Go see the new prices from The Register on Intels price cut   and   AMD following the same course

Just had to include this for go faster stripes

"Compaq is teaming up to challenge IBM's dominance of the supercomputing field. The objective is a computer eight times faster than the current fastest supercomputer - at 1,000 Trillion Operations per Second

Intel is dropping it's 900MHz PIII
According to a newsbyte, PIII's are in most demand with the 133MHz front side bus, so the PIIIs using the 100MHz bus are being ditched

• Full support for DirectX 8.0
• 57 million transistors on a .15 micron manufacturing process. That's 35% more complex than a Pentium 4 !
• More than one trillion operations per second
• 100 billion floating-point ops per second
• Much-improved anti-aliasing - based on four controllers operating in parallel
• Oh aye, estimated street price is $600 - I can wait, then some...

Basically, it's fast again over the GeForce2 as that was other the first generation. Reports say this NV20 is up to four times faster than the GeForce 2 Ultra in terms of anti-aliasing.

The Register says 'Nvidia GeForce 3 is go'

Go gorge on stats, comparisons and screen stocks


Domain News: New Horizons for Domain Names

The ICANN Board of Directors approved seven new Top Level Domains for use on the Internet.
These are:

• .aero
• .biz
• .coop
• .info
• .museum
• .name
• pro

Soon you'll be able to register them for real.

Read more about it here

Happy New Year...

Unless, like me, you're having a ( ) of time with your service provider.

Applauds BT - NOT !

On the news front, 133Mhz SDRAMs are currently as low as £89 ex vat - for 256Mb sticks ! (Major on third).

*Shuddering as he remembers paying £59 ex vat per ONE Mb just a few years back...