The Register: Intel patents IA-64 instruction set

A stack of new patents filed by Intel has provoked speculation that the company is in effect trying to patent the IA-64 instruction set.

Dave Winer's latest wierd survey. Interesting results too!!

Jon Udell: Let's Groove With Ray Ozzie

Groove embraces the peer-to-peer model that's all the rage nowadays. Recognize, though, that the project began in 1997, long before Napster and the ensuing P2P hullabaloo. P2P is one of a number of Groove's technological underpinnings (security and synchronization are some others), and it's P2P that gets people's attention nowadays. But the term that defines Groove for me is not P2P. It's groupware.

Paul Everitt in Re: Zope Newbie News explains how Guido van Rossum, Python creator, landed at Digital Creations, the home of the Zope object publishing environment.

When we took a look at our plans, which we'll start talking about more this week, it became clear that this was a golden opportunity. Because of PythonLabs we'll get something better into the market sooner, and the impact of "better/sooner" is enormous. Equally important, Python is our secret weapon, and we're going to help accelerate its success.

In Andrea's Weblog: October 31 2000 Andrea links to a Metafilter thread about the question:

Why do you keep a weblog?

In my case the main reason is to try and apply some self-discipline - a daily round-up of some of the things I've found of interest on the web. Other reasons include the incentive to write more and to put down some thoughts and to maintain an 'annotated' bookmark that I can search later. Alas, I'm not really keeping the bargain I made with myself and my writing has all but dried up. One reason for this in the past couple of weeks is the fact that my rail travel has been greatly curtailed and I've missed the peace and quiet that I need to pursue this activity. Once I get home the family takes precedence - at least until they have all gone to bed and I can steal an hour or so for surfing.

I have no real idea of how many people visit this site and, besides, the number of readers is not really an issue. I know some of my students drop by occasionally and to a certain extent I cater for that community as the links/comments I post about computer and web technologies - in particular computer architecture and design - reflect my interest in these and, to a great extent, what I consider important/fascinating. One of these days I may even make up a list of bookmarks I visit often.

Most of the links I refer to in Duncan's Jotter have been cited on weblogs that I regularly visit. The weblog community is a fascinating mix of people and I just wish there were more hours in the day to visit more of them more regularly than I do.

I'd encourage anyone that may have suggestions for (CAD) links to drop me an e-mail. I do appreciate personal site recommendations.

Thanks for reading.

Duncan

Quite a few of my students have their own web-sites that are often promoted in their e-mail .sigs. I always make an effort to check them out as I usually learn all sorts of interesting things. For instance, what hairstyles they don't like, who the most boring lecturers are, what types of consultancy they offer ;-), etc., etc.

Call me evil, but I like replying to their e-mails with a wee snippet gleaned from their site. For example:

the lectures so far have been so boring that i've starting drawing cartoons on my lecture notes.

Surely not in my lectures ;-)

Applied Digital Solutions has developed a new technology that they believe will revolutionize E-Business security, emergency location and medical monitoring and commodities supply chain management (food safety). That technology has been named Digital Angel (TM).

The idea behind the initial version of Digital Angel is to build a microchip that can be worn close to the body. This microchip will include biosensors that will measure the biological parameters of the body and store this information.

It will also have an antenna that will receive signals from GPS satellites. The geographic location of the chip can be derived from these signals. The antenna also communicates with ground stations. It will receive commands from the stations and will send the biological information and location data to the ground station. This could take the form of a distress signal sent to a monitoring facility when the unit detects a medical emergency.

...

Digital Angel measures bodily parameters. It does not interact with the body chemically or biologically. Designed to be completely harmless, Digital Angel will not interfere with bodily functions in any way.

Imagine a Digital Angel that did interfere with bodily functions. I certainly wouldn't want it to be controlled a Microsoft OS in that case ;-)

It's almost time to put the clocks back an hour but I'm not hanging around until then.

CNET.com - The P2P myth: Business, bandwidth may dash hopes of a peer-to-peer utopia. A great article in four parts (with informative sidebars in each) covering:

• Independent-minded peer-to-peer developers are already fighting corporate influence. But the Internet's evolution shows that commercial control of such technology may be inevitable.
• Regardless of their creators' high-minded ambitions, peer-to-peer networks' growth could be held back by the speed and capacity of home computers.
• Entrepreneurs and venture capitalists are salivating at the prospects of a new digital industry, but the lack of central control presents unique obstacles to traditional business models.
• Peer-to-peer proponents say traditional ideas about computing could be redefined by the potential to use the processing power and storage space of millions of PCs.

SegaWeb.com: Features: PS2: Disappointing Technology

I remember when the PS2 was first announced and the technical specifications that were bandied about at that time: 75 million polygons/second, unlimited streaming texture potential, 48GB/s of memory bandwidth, and so on. It wasn't long after this that technology analysts began to question Sony's numbers.

...

To better understand the PS2's limitations and the Dreamcast's strengths, you need only look at the available video memory for your answer. While the DC has 8MB of VRAM, the PS2 has only 4MB of VRAM. The main problem arises because a polygon takes up roughly 40 bytes of RAM. When you have 5 million of them in a given second, this amounts to 5 million/60fps = 83,333 polygons in a give frame of animation. If each of these polygons uses 40 bytes of VRAM, you will use 3.33 MB displaying these 5 million PPS. This doesn't leave the PS2 much room for it's framebuffer which uses around 1.2MB just to display the end data, not to mention that you still need to leave room for textures to put on those polygons.

SegaWeb.com: Features: PS2: Disappointing The Market

While it isn't surprising that Sony is losing money with their PS2 launch, the extent of those losses has not yet been realized by most of the mainstream media. Bloomberg estimates that each PS2 costs $488 to build. Therefore, ignoring marketing costs - which can sometimes amount to $50-$60 per unit - every American PS2 represents a loss of $188 that Sony has to recoup with game sales. In Japan, where costs have been closer to $550 per unit, the unit retails for $370 - yielding a similar loss of $180.