Techo: Not Quite 3D

Here's a fascinating article about a new form of electron movement.
It's not something that you can try out on your kitchen table though!

...
"Working with one of the purest semiconductor materials ever made, they discovered the quasi-three-dimensional electron crystal in a device cooled at ultra-low temperatures roughly 100 times colder than intergalactic space. The material was then exposed to the most powerful continuous magnetic fields generated on Earth."
...

Techo: 4 Teraflop in a 1U rack-space!

Now that's Impressive!

...
With the world’s first teraflop many-core processor, the NVIDIA^® Tesla™ S1070 computing system speeds the transition to energy-efficient parallel computing.
With 960 processor cores and a standard C compiler that simplifies application development, Tesla S1070 scales to solve the world’s most important computing challenges—more quickly and accurately.

Feeding HPC Industry’s Relentless Demand for Performance.
Keeps pace with the increasing demands of the toughest computing challenges including drug research, oil and gas exploration and computational finance.

Many-core Architecture Delivers Optimum Scaling across HPC Applications.
Parallel performance from 960 cores capable of concurrent execution of thousands of computing threads and scalable architecture meets computational demands of applications whose complexity has outstripped the CPU’s ability to solve them.
...

Which leads to things like This -

Evolved Machines is reverse-engineering brain circuits to develop a new paradigm for device technology. Their research work requires the large-scale simulation of neuro biologically realistic neural circuits which require enormous parallel computing capacity. Simulation of a single neuron involves 200,000,000 differential equation evaluations per second, requiring approximately 4 gigaflops. A neural array engaged in sensory processing requires thousands of neurons, thus, the detailed simulation of neural systems in real time requires more than 10 teraflops of computing power.
...

Techo: Running Leopard on your PC

It seems I have the right hardware and it sure looks easy.

Review: EFiX Dongle Perfectly Transforms PC to Mac

When we first heard about EFiX—a simple USB dongle that'll let you magically install Leopard on your PC—it sounded too fantastic to be true. Well, I used it to turn my gaming PC into a Mac Pro over the weekend, and I'm somewhat amazed to say this, but it works perfectly.

I grabbed all the updates straight from Apple—including 10.5.5 last night, so you don't have to wait for a hacked patch like you would running a typical Hackintosh—installed a whole bunch of software and have been using it for several days. It runs beautifully, just like a real Mac Pro.

The Process

...

Techo: MS will make Hyper-V a free download!

It seems they definitely want control of the virtualisation market from VMware.
I suspect that is so that there are no backdoors owned by anyone else that can be used to subvert their security/DRM so they can forge ahead with their content provider plans.

Anyway, more on this story Here.

Techo: The new Homebrew!

A successor to the GP2x series of open-source handheld gaming devices.
Best thing of all is that GP2X is far from dead, all that has to be done is recompiling of GP2X Homebrew.

Not a bad specification either.
The Linux-powered device (running its own GP2X distribution) has an Arm9 533mHZ processor, 3D Accelerator and 64 MB of ram, 1GB of built-in NAND flash memory, an external SD card slot, and a single USB 2.0 connection.
It has a LiIon battery built-in, a place for the stylus, and a nice 2.8" OLED touch screen panel with a resolution of 320 by 240 (QVGA).
The most interesting thing is the Flash Player (Flash 7.0 compatible) and the planned release of commercial games.
If everything works out as planned, it will be shipped in mid October.

More info' here and on the linked pages.

Techo: Free Hex Editor/Inspector

Rather nice and available for free Here.
It features support for all basic data types, Endian-ness, File, Memory and Disk sector editing and Explorer integration.

Click the picture for a larger image of the tool as I'm using it in Vista.

There are Standard, Professional and Ultimate version too (for increasing prices).

Techo: A goody for the Embedded Dev's

Here's a nice thing - LinuxStamp!


An open-source design, but you can buy one ready-built for only US $120 anyway.

Features:
* Atmel AT91RM9200 processor (Arm9 processor with MMU, 180Mhz operation)
* 32MB SDRAM (Only limited by 1x 54-TSOP SDRAM chip)
* 8MB SPI Dataflash
* 1x 10/100 Ethernet
* 1x USB host port (allows wifi adapters, flash drives and other USB devices to be used)
* 1x SD card slot
* Serial debug port access through FTDI USB/Serial converter
* JTAG port
* 2-Layer PCB design
* POE capable (48v -> 5v Power supply can be implemented on a motherboard)

I'll definitely be considering this for my future projects.

Mind you, Hammer and Nails is good too.

Techo: A Larrabee primer

A handy set of links from Blues News -

• Intel details future 'Larrabee' graphics chip.
• Intel's Larrabee Architecture Disclosure: A Calculated First Move.
• Intel's Larrabee Architecture previews on HEXUS.net, PC Perspective, and Tech ARP.
• Intel’s Line of Graphics Chips Could Have Broader Uses.

I'b be surprised if this super-CPU (not a GPU) didn't kick ass with Michael Abrash on the design team!
As Anand says in the article linked above:-

For those who haven't idolized Abrash, his Wikipedia entry helps explain his luminary status in the game industry:

"Michael Abrash is a highly regarded technical writer, and one of the top optimization and 80x86 assembly language programmers, a reputation cemented by his 1990 book Zen of Assembly Language Volume 1: Knowledge. Before getting into technical writing, Abrash was a game programmer, having written his first commercial game in 1982. After working at Microsoft on graphics and assembly code for Windows NT 3.1, he returned to the game industry in the mid-1990s to work on Quake for id Software. Some of the technology behind Quake is documented in Abrash's Graphics Programming Black Book. After Quake was released, Abrash returned to Microsoft to work on natural language research, then moved to the Xbox team, until 2001. In 2002, Abrash went to work for RAD Game Tools, where he co-wrote the advanced Pixomatic software renderer, which emulates the functionality of a DirectX 7-level graphics card and is used as the software renderer in such games as Unreal Tournament 2004."

Techo: Now That's Cool!

First they immerse it in liquid helium to cool it to 3 degrees Kelvin (Absolute).
Then they run the refrigeration unit to take it down to 10 milli-Kelvin!

Your encryption keys won't be safe for much longer - read about it here.

Techo: CPU Usage 1%

Yes, well you'll get that with 64-bit Windows Server 2008 Datacenter...
IF you have 64 processors and 2 TiB (2,048 GiB) of RAM!

Much more on Pushing the Limits of Windows Physical Memory, for the many varieties of Windows, by the cluey Mark Russinovich here.

Techo: Opening up TWO cans of Wupass!

On Intel, AMD/ATI and Nvidia.
Maybe PC prices will drop further with a bit of luck!

Email evidence unveiled in NVIDIA/ATI price fixing civil action

EU Files New Charges Against Intel

Techo: SSDs not quite so bad as first thought

Toms Hardware has taken note of criticism of their SSD/HDD battery-life evaluation, such as this one by George Ou that I read some days ago -
http://www.formortals.com/Home/tabid/36/EntryID/81/Default.aspx

Here is Toms Hardware's apology and revised evaluation -
http://www.engadget.com/2008/07/15/toms-hardware-rescinds-ssd-power-test-finds-them-more-efficien/

This time, George gives then an 'A-' instead of an 'F' -
http://www.formortals.com/Home/tabid/36/EntryID/83/Default.aspx


The more important thing, imo, is the differences between Single-Level Cells and Multi-Level Cells (SLC and MLC) used in Flash memories.
MLC is inferior in performance, but cheaper to make, so guess which one the manufacturers want to foist on us?

I vented (just a little bit) here -
http://www.bluesnews.com/cgi-bin/board.pl?action=viewthread&threadid=89349
I'll tell you right now,
MLC is the HD/DVD of SSDs, SLC is the Blu-Ray of SSDs.
People just won't settle for cheaper but inferior, no matter how many profit dollar signs are in the vendors eyes.
They might as well get used to it and concentrate on SLC and bring the price down by total market dominance, that works!

Techo: Nvidia price-cuts, no surprise there...

Except for Nvidia who are probably sobbing their socks off that that they aren't making the profit they expected due to unexcpectedly stiff competition from AMD/ATI.

Here's the news -
http://gizmodo.com/5024873/top+end-nvidia-geforce-gtx-280-260-graphics-cards-get-huge-price-cut
Nvidia's top end GeForce GTX 260 and 280 graphics cards ... launched for $399 and $650, respectively, less than a month ago.
But pressure from ATI has driven Nvidia to already cut the price, hard.
The GTX 280 is now only $399, while the GTX 260 is $299, the same price as ATI's HD 4870.
Good to see ATI back in the fight.
Anyone already buy this and feel hosed though? Competition is a lovely thing.

And here's a pre-pricecut story, by a fellow Blue Mountains resident, on why ATI cards caned Nvidia so hard -
http://www.dansdata.com/askdan00034.htm

Techo: A free seamless texture creation tool

This free tool is handy for creating textures that tile without visible joins, both for 3D modelling work and as backgrounds for web pages etc'.
And don't think it can only do plain wood textures.

http://www.spiralgraphics.biz/ww_overview.htm

Here's one I made in a couple of minutes -


The tool itself is only a 4.5 MB download, if you would like a downloadable friendly tutorial video of it in use, this one is 130 MB -

http://vidtuts.s3.amazonaws.com/Make-seamless-textures-with-Wood-Workshop.mp4

This link shows a lower-resolution version of the tutorial, but also has links to hundreds of ready-made seamless textures -
http://blog.secondlife.com/2008/06/28/make-seamless-textures-with-wood-workshop-video-tip-of-the-week-40/

Techo: Was Dr Who right all those years ago?

This article -
http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=the-self-organizing-quantum-universe
mentions -
"A theory of quantum gravity aims to describe the nature of spacetime on the very smallest scales—the voids in between the smallest known elementary particles—by quantum laws and possibly explain it in terms of some fundamental constituents."

That sounds a lot like "Interstitial Space" as mentioned in Dr Who decades ago, this is a comparatively recent mention of it -
http://www.drwhoguide.com/who_ma33.htm

Anyway, if you have a heap of time spare, it's a very interesting article (imo as always).

Techo: Aussie Telco's screw us so bad

I pay $80 for 25GB a month at 1.5 Mbps up and 256Kbps down, so this story about a new Japanese broadband cap makes me really depressed.

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080625-japanese-isp-institutes-upload-caps-of-30gb-daily.html

That's a cap of 30 Gigabytes UPLOAD per day over 100 Mbps fibre (100 Mbps both ways!) with UNLIMITED downloads!
Telstra still apparently doubts that the market will use all the bandwidth that they can supply, so we're still in the dark ages of wire to the home.
It's cold comfort that the US telco' infrastructure is (according to the article) similarly retarded and their carriers are now adopting download caps too.

UPDATE
I wondered how much the japanese paid for that, so I Googled "Japan broadband cost" (without the quotes). Now I'm really sad!
http://mybroadband.co.za/news/Telecoms/656.html
$0.22 per Mbit per Second per month, That's $22 a month for 100 Mbit!

How did it get to be like that? Here are some clues -
http://www.itif.org/files/Ebihara_Japanese_Broadband.pdf

----------------------------------------------------------------------

Sigh, However, since I get a new 25GB allocation starting tomorrow and have 6GB to use up today (I'm always careful to leave plenty for my wife to VPN into work from home), I have decided to get this 5-part documentary on the history of the computer -
http://waxy.org/2008/06/the_machine_that_changed_the_world_the_world_at_your_fingertips/

If you don't have a torrent download program, may I recommend Vuze (formerly Azureus) as an easy to use tool with a good catalogue of continually updated media recommendations built right in -
http://www.vuze.com/app

Techo: Way overdue RAM capacity advance

The 64-bit CPU and OS guys and the RAM guys seem to have been waiting for each other to make the first mass marketing moves. Now WinChip has made the first move with a 4-slot 16GB DDR2 kit.

I rather think this will actually get the ball rolling for 64-bit Operating Systems sales, up to now it hasn't been worth losing backwards compatibility with 16-bit applications for the small RAM and performance improvements of 64-bit.
(At the non-professional/enthusiast price point on readily available mainboards that support 4GB DRAM DIMMS, that is)

Winchip DDR2 667 MHz 16 GB Quad Kit

Techo: Ray-Tracing and 2 free games

Well, a free Ray-Tracing 3D engine, one free game and another game in Beta that will be available for free when completed in early July.

First, the fascinating article with plenty of sample pictures -
Ray Tracing in Games: A Story from The Other Side


And where to pick up the games - Arauna Realtime Ray Tracing