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Weapons maker forecasts a big market for system to safeguard large areas from rockets and missiles.

Northrop Grumman forecast Wednesday a potential "very large" market for a laser-based system it has developed to shield airports and other installations from rockets, ballistic missiles and other threats.
Los Angeles-based Northrop said it had already pitched the system, called Skyguard, to Israel, which worked with the company and the Army to develop the technology.
Northrop also is pushing Skyguard - described as capable of generating a shield five kilometers in radius - to each of the armed services and the Department of Homeland Security, company executives told a news briefing.
Setting up a protective "bubble" around a typical airport might cost $25 million to $30 million once enough systems were installed, said Mike McVey, vice president of directed energy systems at Northrop's Space Technology business unit.
"If it goes that path, it's a very large market," he said, citing potential demand from Japan, South Korea, Taiwan and what he called virtually any country facing a threat from a neighbor.
For the United States, an initial unit could be ready in 18 months for $150 million to $200 million, added Dan Wildt, Northrop's director of business development for directed energy systems.
Northrop described Skyguard as capable of destroying rockets, mortars, artillery shells, unmanned aerial vehicles, short-range ballistic missiles, as well as cruise missiles. Against shoulder-fired missiles, which are relatively easy to heat with a laser and destroy, the protective shield would extend to a 20-kilometer radius, Wildt said.

sa: http://money.cnn.com/2006/07/12/news...reut/index.htm

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Taiwanese insiders revealed to DigiTimes last month that NVIDIA was preparing AGP versions of its GeForce 7600 graphics cards for a release some time this quarter. NVIDIA has yet to make any such announcement, but The Inquirer now has word that ATI may also be planning to refresh its mid-range AGP lineup. The site says ATI is readying a new AGP graphics card based on its upcoming RV560 GPU, which other sources suggest will be introduced at $199 as the Radeon X1700 later this year.
According to The Inq, the AGP RV560 variant will have a 450 MHz core clock and 256 MB of 650 MHz GDDR3 memory pumping data through a 128-bit memory bus. Previous info from X-bit labs suggests the vanilla RV560 will sport 24 pixel shader processors as well as eight texture units, and DigiTimes heard last month from its graphics card manufacturer moles that the chip will be one of ATI's first 80 nm parts. X-bit labs's sources said the RV560 will launch during the back-to-school season, but The Inq believes the AGP flavor won't show up until October.

sa: http://techreport.com/onearticle.x/10344

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Intel Core 2 Architecture
The Core 2 architecture differs radically from the NetBurst microarchitecture used in the Pentium 4 and Pentium D processors. NetBurst relied on very deep pipelines—as many as 31 stages for the latest CPUs—to reach higher and higher frequencies. Eventually, that architecture ran into a brick wall: higher frequencies consumed too much power and generated too much heat. Intel never officially shipped a 4GHz CPU, even though it was talking about processors beyond 5GHz just a couple of years back.
Core 2 strives for greater efficiency while still offering performance substantially above past Intel products. Let's take a look at a few of the key aspects.
Continued Here

sa: http://www.extremetech.com/article2/...1988794,00.asp

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Dell is enlisting the help of the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission in its autopsy of the now-infamous "exploding laptop". According to Lionel Menchaca, a Dell Digital Media Manager, on the company's new blog:

Dell's engineering teams are working with the Consumer Product Safety Commission and a third-party failure analysis lab to determine the root cause of this failure and to ensure we take all appropriate measures to help prevent a recurrence.

The federal consumer unit could become an ally to Dell, which is pointing the finger at the exploding laptop's lithium ion battery unit. The Consumer Product Safety Commission has repeatedly found problems with lithium ion batteries in a number of electronic devices, including - since last year - laptops manufactured by Dell rivals Apple and Hewlett-Packard. (Apple, Dell and HP have all had to recall thousands of units with the batteries at the CPSC's behest due to fire and safety hazards.)
Dell has been working to firewall off any more bad press from exploding laptop issues. Industry journal The Inquirer published a letter to the editor on July 4, purportedly from a second Dell customer (identified only as "Rich S.," an IT administrator from Pittsburgh) who suffered an exploding laptop. That letter prompted analyst Cindy Shaw from Moors & Cabot to issue an investor alert that more bad press on the issue could be damaging to Dell.
However, when I asked a Dell spokeswoman about that report, she responded in an email that, "(o)ur investigation so far has not indicated any broader trend..." She encouraged the anonymous letter writer to contact Dell.

sa: http://www.crn.com/sections/dell/del...leId=190400211

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Greater Shanghai has a population that has passed 20 million. The sprawl of Mexico City is estimated to house another 20 million. And Mumbai too.
These cities are bigger than many industrialised nations. And they are growing at a dizzying rate, sucking in workers from rural areas.
Sociologist Professor Richard Sennett believes the rise of these cities is changing their relationship with the countries they are in. He is one of a number of academics carrying out research into the evolution of cities.
Economically, many of the world's great cities are already divorced from their nation-states, with their main streams of investment come from other great cities.
"The most important place to London is New York and to New York is London and Tokyo," Prof Sennett says. "London belongs to a country composed of itself and New York."

Anything short of a fully independent city state is a lost opportunity...

London Mayor Ken Livingston
And the need to co-ordinate ever more frenetic regeneration and infrastructure growth has led to increasing power for cities.
Shanghai has so much power and autonomy it has been described as effectively a city-state, within China only in geography. And on Thursday London Mayor Ken Livingstone was handed a raft of new powers over planning, housing and the environment.
... "Having been to Singapore and seen how successful it was I think anything short of a fully independent city state is a lost opportunity, with its own foreign and defence policies thrown in."

sa: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/magazine/5179232.stm

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A new method to add defects to the structure of single-walled carbon nanotubes could expand their electronic properties and open the path to nanoelectronics, those involved in the research said.
Carbon cylinders a few billionths of a meter in diameter and a few microns long, these nanotubes are one of the strongest structures known and have unique electrical and thermal properties, the scientists said.
Argonne National Lab's Peter Zapol (left) and Larry Curtiss with a model of the zipper nanotube.
The method to add defects to carbon nanotube walls was developed by researchers at the US Department of Energy's Argonne National Laboratory, who are interested in improving the materials for thermoelectric power generation (the use of heat differences to generate electricity). Thermoelectric conversion is the principle behind thermocouples, thermal diodes and solid-state refrigerators.
"If you change the electronic structure," said Argonne chemist Larry Curtiss, "by adding defects in an ordered way, theoretically you can make more efficient thermoelectric materials. So we could produce electricity more efficiently from solar, nuclear or any thermal power generation." Curtiss is group leader of the Molecular Materials Group in Argonne's Materials Science Div.

sa: http://www.photonics.com/content/new...y/5/83243.aspx

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Using laser "tweezers", physicists have succeeded in sorting up to seven atoms and putting them in a line. The researchers said their method -- which could be used as a memory device that has quantum information stored in strings of equally spaced atoms -- clears a major hurdle on the path to building a quantum computer.
In the experiment, which was documented on film, the research team headed by Arno Rauschenbeutel, PhD, and professor Dieter Meschede of the University of Bonn, decelerated several caesium atoms (used in atomic clocks) for a period of several seconds so that they were hardly moving, then loaded them onto a "conveyor belt" consisting of lasers. This conveyor belt is made up of a standing light wave composed of many peaks and troughs and resembles a piece of corrugated iron.
Unless they are forcibly slowed, atoms can move incredibly fast. For example, at room temperature, atoms making up gases in the air move at a speed of about 1100 mph.
"Unfortunately it cannot be predicted which trough precisely the atoms will land in," Rauschenbeutel said. "It's rather like pouring several eggs from a big dish into an egg carton -- which section each egg rolls into is a matter of chance."
However, anyone wishing to calculate with atoms must be able to place them exactly. "All the atoms on the conveyor belt have to have the same distance from each other," Rauschenbeutel said of the challenge. "Only then can we get them to interact in a controlled way in what is called a quantum gate." By lining up gate operations like these, it would already be possible to carry out simple quantum calculations, he said.
The physicists subsequently "sorted" the atoms in their experiment on the conveyor belt. They did this by first taking a photo to record their positions. They next set the conveyor belt moving -- and with it the caesium atoms trapped in the troughs. In this way they transported the wrongly placed atoms to their laser tweezers -- this is basically nothing more than another conveyor belt consisting of laser beams which is oriented orthogonally to the first conveyor belt.
"When we set the tweezers' light wave in motion, we can lift the wrongly placed atoms off the conveyor belt," Rauschenbeutel said. "Then we move the conveyor belt to the desired position and simply pop the atom back in."
The film shows how well this works: the tweezers select two atoms consecutively from the belt and put them back on again in such a way that they are exactly the same distance from each other and from a third atom. "Sorting seven atoms in this way takes us about two seconds," Rauschenbeutel said.
The next aim of the physicists is to construct a quantum gate. For this purpose they want to "write" quantum information onto two caesium atoms and then place them between two tiny mirrors. The intention is that they should interact there with each other, i.e. exchange information by emitting and absorbing fluorescent light. If this is successful, it will be the next milestone for the researchers on their way to the quantum computer.

sa http://www.photonics.com/content/new.../14/83510.aspx

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Here

Get them while they're up!

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Both ATI and Nvidia have succeeded in establishing workable driver solutions for a broad range of their latest product lines, from the minimally-equipped budget-oriented to extravagantly-detailed enthusiast products. In this article, we examine the basic performance differentials for a Radeon X1900 XTX and GeForce 7800 GTX. Our aim is to help readers establish a basis from which to compare Linux and Windows driver performance. Examination of both cards uses vendor-issued driver sets under a common distribution, with Unreal Tournament 2004 benchmarks to facilitate the comparison.
ATI and NVIDIA Linux Graphics Drivers
The evolution of Linux as a gaming platform has not been without its trials and tribulations. In general, Linux driver support remains a hit-or-miss proposition; some of these devices have been around for months, if not years, without proper vendor support for the Linux community. Graphics cards are an entirely separate ball of wax, especially for gaming, where some features may be present in hardware but unsupported in software. There are features that purport to enjoy software support but work only occasionally, intermittently, or not at all.
Contiued

sa: http://www.tomshardware.com/2006/07/...nux/index.html

Originally Posted by bbmf

Link:
http://forums.vr-zone.com.sg/showpos...13&postcount=1

I was very disappointed to find after clicking your link that there was no picture of this phone to go along with your commontary. Do better next time.
Serve or perish Mistress Dar

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Seven global memory chip-makers have been sued by 34 US States. These include Micron Technology Inc., and Hynix Semiconductor Inc., on charges of price-fixing that cost consumers millions of dollars.
The multi-state complaint, now filed as a lawsuit in a district court in California comes one day after New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer filed his own complaint that reflected the charges brought by the others and includes, world’s biggest memory chip-maker Samsung Electronics Co.
The multi-state lawsuit did not name Samsung to give the company and attorneys general time to reach a potential settlement - something Spitzer, who is running for governor, elected not to do.
Meanwhile, Samsung maintains that it would resolve the lawsuit, while a Micron spokesperson said the Boise, Idaho-based company has been in talks.

sa: http://www.efytimes.com/fullnews13.a...12994&magid=11

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Intel has long been locked in a brutal chess game with chip rival Advanced Micro Devices. Now it looks as if the world's biggest chipmaker is ready to sacrifice the rest of its pawns.
The Santa Clara, Calif.-based Intel is set to release several new products over the next few months, including a highly anticipated chip for servers. But Intel is already hitting back hard at its Silicon Valley rival on another front: price.
In an attempt to stem a slow loss of market share, Intel has deeply discounted what computer manufacturers pay for many of its existing processors. AMD has been forced to cut prices as well. And further cuts could be coming, analysts say. That means consumers in the market for a new computer could soon get even bigger bargains.
"You will certainly get more bang for the buck," says Toni Duboise, senior analyst of desktop computing at Current Analysis, a market research firm. She notes that both Intel- and AMD-based machines with 64-bit processors can now be had for $499, about $100 less than they were earlier this year. And, she adds, "you are getting more performance for your investment."
Upgrades. Consumers and the companies that assemble computers, such as Dell, aren't the only ones that will benefit from this battle. Suppliers of peripherals like hard drives and DVD burners may also be helped as the box makers choose to use the savings on processors to offer consumers upgraded components, analysts say.
But for Intel and AMD, this could very well be a bloody war that produces no clear victor. Profit margins are sure to suffer. And Intel's push to regain market share--it still supplies some 80 percent of semiconductors used in PCs worldwide--comes at a time when both companies are already contending with a glut of chips on the market.
Needham & Co. managing director Charlie Glavin believes that by next year overcapacity will probably reach 20 percent. By 2008, it could hit 40 percent. "And neither company can cut back on capital spending because both companies have to keep getting down to smaller and smaller size chips in order to compete on power and cost," says Glavin. He adds that he doesn't quite understand why "Intel and AMD are content to spoil a perfectly good oligopoly" with this price war.
Bad news? AMD is already showing the strain. Intel's talk about further price cuts has kept chip buyers on the sidelines. Citing this lower demand, AMD this month lowered its revenue and earnings outlook. It also warned that second-quarter revenue would fall by 9 percent to about $1.22 billion.
Intel has remained mum on its outlook, but both companies are set to report earnings this week. Some analysts fear that Intel might also release bad news. It has cut its chip prices by an estimated 50 to 60 percent. Last week, Intel announced plans to lay off 1,000 managers, and more cuts are in the offing.
Merrill Lynch analyst Joe Osha wrote to clients in a note titled "The Shoe Drops" that both companies were hurting, with the companies' aggregate processor revenue set for a double-digit decline from this year's first quarter.
Continued

sa: http://www.usnews.com/usnews/biztech...16/24chips.htm

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What are you personally most proud of with the launch of Woodcrest?
The Core microarchitecture that’s at the heart of Woodcrest is not the performance king like the 486 was in its day [and] it’s not the platform king like the Pentium Pro was in its day — this is the energy-efficient king. It really is this incredibly well-tuned machine of trade-offs of power and performance.
What could you have done better with Woodcrest?
The FB-DIMMs’ [fully buffered dual inline memory module] power was over budget, and that was disappointing. So this tremendously good processor is making up for a bit of weakness in the power of the [FB-DIMMs’] subsystem. We’ll get it fixed in subsequent revisions ... but that was disappointing this time around that we didn’t do a bit better job there.
What makes you so sure you’ll gain back the market share lost to AMD over the past couple of years?
Since the beginning of the year, we have been aggressively seeding the platform with customers. We have 3,000 of these things out in the marketplace today, and the responses from OEMs, ISVs, SIs and end-users has been nothing but spectacular ... Fundamentally, I think there’s pent-up demand [and] we expect to see a very rapid product ramp-up as a result.
You’ve said in the past that AMD’s integrated memory controller is over-hyped, yet you’ve also said you plan to add an integrated memory controller to your own future chips. Can you clarify that?
We’ve never said the integrated memory controller is bad, but it is severely over-hyped today ... Our cache is twice as effective as theirs, so that means I go to memory half as often. So, independent of anything else, if I’m going to memory half as much, who cares how long it takes to get to memory? Plus, the other aspect of their design is they have this view of local memory and remote memory. So, if you’re running an operating system, half the time you are local and half the time you are remote. Guess what, when you are remote I have to go here and then go here. The time to get over there is actually equal to the time for us to get to our memory.
So are you still planning to add the integrated memory controller to future chips?
Eventually, we’re looking at that as an engineering trade-off, and we’ll probably make that part of our product line in the future. Why? Because we can. Not that it’s bad, but it’s not some big deal, or big architectural delta, it’s simply an engineering trade-off that, particularly as the cache continues to get larger and larger, it’s probably a good thing to add to it as it doesn’t hurt.
Could you talk a little bit about the overall multicore processing movement and some of the hurdles you are facing as you get to more and more cores?
For the near-term, at 90nm, we were mostly single core and a little bit of dual core. At 65nm, we’re almost all dual core and a little bit of quad core. At 45nm, mostly quad core and a little bit of octagonal core. It just follows Moore’s Law. That’s what we’re expecting on the immediate horizon. The problem is, as you keep going to the higher and higher core counts, you need more and more things operating in parallel. Since the beginning of computing, people have been trying to solve the parallel programming problem.
Today, most multicore machines are actually running multi-tasking, where there is not a lot of multithreads inside of it, but with each task there is a little bit of threading going on. ... If you follow the progression I described, if I’m here in 2012, my desktop is going to have 16 cores on it. It’s this huge programming challenge, and that will be the big barrier for us to fully realise the benefits of multicore designs as we go forward. It’s not a solved problem by any means. There are some promising areas for breakthroughs.
Such as?
One of them we would call the area of domain-specific programming, where solving the general purpose parallel program is really hard. But if you think about them in certain domains, you can make some big breakthroughs. There are also some characteristics of certain problems that look to be what we call embarrassingly parallel. One example of that might be an application area called ray tracing. Instead of actually trying to render gross images of lights onto rendered displays, which is typically done in different polygon shading today, what they’ll do is model every photon of light and all of its reflections as it bounces around and each photon then becomes a thread of execution. ... In those cases, we’ve seen parallelism up to 100 or 200 threads of parallel, still resulting in very, very high degrees of performance improvement.
We envision this world where it becomes impossible to tell the difference between what’s been rendered and what’s been real ... some of it, you might think so my kids will like games better, but other examples are very interesting, maybe we’ll model the real physics of a tumour and see it really grow and see what characteristics it would take as it touches different tissue types.
Could you talk about Itanium and how it fits into your server chip plans, with respect to your Xeon chips?
If you look at that marketplace segment today, you have four big players: Sparc, Power, PA and Itanium. All of PA is going to Itanium. You have Sparc, for which you have to begun to see the sunset — McNealy’s resignation was more than symbolic. When you look at it today, the revenue from Itanium system as we ended last year was approximately half the size of Power and Sparc, respectively. It’s clearly emerged as the third player today. Our goal is to make it the second player and, eventually, to make it the [main] player.
We think the characteristics that we’re building into Itanium for memory size, RAS, error detection and correction and non-stop capabilities really make it a serious long-term player. Right now, we are in production today on ‘Montecito’, the next generation of products, and we’ll see the announcements of those from system vendors next quarter.
Do you see Xeon sales cannibalising Itanium sales?
There are areas that it’s contested ... examples of some of the battle zones might be in a high-performance computing installation. Neither one is wrong, but for different kinds of applications the Itanium example will win hands down. For the more parallel, [as] you want to run them in a more distributed fashion, the Xeon will have a better price performance characteristic for it. Those are just some places we’re seeing different approaches played out in the marketplace, but for a lot of the very high-end stuff — the banking systems, big transactions, big ERP systems — that seems to be a pretty stable mainframe-type marketplace, despite my proclamations of its death 15 years ago.

sa: http://computerworld.co.nz/news.nsf/...2?OpenDocument

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Motherboard ASUS P5W-DH Deluxe
Processor Intel Core 2 Duo E6600 ES
Gigabyte GeForce 7600GS 256 MB :p
ADATA DDR2-800 512 x 2
PSU TAGAN 1100 Watt U-95
HSF Gigabyte G-Powe Pro Cooler

sa: http://forums.vr-zone.com.sg/showpos...18&postcount=1

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Grab a coffee and a snack first...

sa: http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1895,1989209,00.asp