Posts by kit

China hopes home-grown OS will oust Microsoft

Re: The key will be drivers

Its acceptance also depends on the tens of thousands of programs that is working on Windows, will be available on the new OS.

China ponders ban on IBM servers

Alternatives

What are the alternatives.

Does the Chinese government have alternatives?

Oracles', HPs', Microsofts',Fujitecs' . or their own technology which IBM has developed for the last few decades, in terms of speed, security, stability which are unmatched in computing technology.

Intel, Sun vet births fast, inexpensive 3D chip-stacking breakthrough

Does its performance still hampered by signal noise and the speed of the signal processors? If so , I recog it as an intermediate solution with respect to real TSV

US military's RAY-GUN truck BLASTS DRONES, mortars OUT OF THE SKY

Drawback

Laser weapon is not without its drawback. It can only attack ordinances once at a time. Unless your laser gun is powerful enough to destroy incoming ordinance quickly in succession. Missiles are the preferred weapons for multiple attacking targets.

A chrome plated object is sensitive both to radar and naked eyes. I doubt if any weapon designer would do.

London Underground cleaners to refuse fingerprint clock-on

how about the alternative- facial recognition.

they may go on strike anyway

ZTE Open: This dirt-cheap smartphone is a swing and a miss

Re: Compare it with Samsung pocket

I would like to compare the android with firefox os similarly to chrome to firefox browser. Initially firefox were both slower and unstable, after some time, firefox beats chrome both in speed and stability, which I expect firefox os will do in future.

DARPA looks for a guided bullet with DEAD reckoning navigation

Re: How is navigation performed?

It all comes down to the nano-nisation of microelectronics, Imaging if you can integrate a tiny camera together with image processing processor all inside the bullet. It is not impossible to have a guided bullet does what you want to shoot at.

US Navy blasts drones with ship-mounted LASER CANNON

Re: Thats nice..

Laser canon is one of means to counter the enemy's attacks in the US arsenal. For other targets CIWS comes into play (including multiple short range missiles or multiple-barrel Gatling guns)

Re: Pulse is Infrare, So Silver Paint Probable Won't Make A Difference

It is not about the absorption or the reflection rate of the target, it is about the power out put of the solid state laser. It is about 100KW laser canons that US navy uses, it hits both the personnel or the sensitive electronics of the enemy targets and causes detrimental consequences, if not the total destruction of targets.

Ellison aims his first Oracle 'mainframe' at Big Blue

Re: Fastest ^H^H^H^H^H^H^H processor..?

With the advent of 3D Chips (TSV) and photonic interconnects, I am quiet sure that IBM will blow every other chip makers (including Intel) hell out the surface of the earth.

Re: I'm Not Surprised

As I had said when Oracle were to buy Sun, Larry's comment to compete with IBM, was no more than sale's rhetoric . It was IBM first to use copper chip interconnect, Edram, SOI, strain silicone in their chip manufacturing. It would would very difficult for Larry to beat IBM, by using just words rather than deeds.

Top Firefox OS bloke flames Opera for WebKit surrender

Re: bah

I did not know why FF performed so miserably in your computer(s). I normally use FF more then 12 hours every day without a single crash, In addition FF is the fastest web browser in terms of rendering web pages, even faster than Chrome, though its start up time is a bit slower , but no more than a second or two.

Firefox's birthday present to us: Teaching tech titans about DIY upstarts

Re: +1

Download the latest firefox 15 or 16 beta. It is faster than chrome by split of a second and very stable when surfing the web.

IBM to double-stuff sockets with power-packed Power7+

Re: SRAM vs eDRAM transistor density

The different between Sram vs eDram , is every funtioning Sram cell consists of 6 transistors while eDram has only 2.

Firefox 15 offers fewer leaks, more frags

Re: Tried the game - total fail

Indeed, it is a intel system with a 22nm ivybridge cpu, I try to keep the driver up to date from time to time. what is interesting with firefox 15 , it is faster than chrome when visiting web pages, though it's startup time is a little bit slower, but no more than a second or two.

Re: Tried the game - total fail

I have quiet different experience with firefox 15. After download the latest flash player , I open no fewer 5 flash players at the same time for hours without a single flash on a 64bit window 7. Yesterday I used firefox 15 beta 6 from 8am to 3am 18 hours straight witout a single crash.

Cook's 'values' memo shows Apple has lost its soul

Better Products, not accusations

Does anyone who process a pc would accuse hp,or dell for stealing the design of ibm. or anyone who is using ms excel for stealing the design of lotus123. For goodness sake, for those who bought samsung 's smartphones, is simply the fact that they are better than apples's.

Moore's Law has ten years to run, predicts physicist

Re: Optical network, embedded memory, Graphene, Nanoptube and TSV will replace silicone downsizing.

Attached is the news release from ibm for your question.

http://www-03.ibm.com/press/us/en/pressrelease/33115.wss

Optical network, embedded memory, Graphene, Nanoptube and TSV will replace silicone downsizing.

Silicone tech may run out of steam in perhaps 10 yrs' time. Other techs like inter-core optical networking, massive embedded fast memory (resistive or phase change memory) as well as the application of new materials (graphene and nanotube), and 3-D chips (TSV) , will replace silicone downsizing.

Mozilla isn't a charity case - and Google's $300m will do nicely

email client

In my company, Thunderbird is already used as the default email client.

Firefox ahead of IE in Europe, boosted by Chrome effect

Is 3 seconds too slow for FF

Unless you turn on and off your PC frenquently, it normally takes me 3 seconds to turn on FF (V4.0b8) with loaded local contents.

IBM 'one atom, one bit' storage breakthrough

A thonsand layers of memrister memory?

Think of the the heat a thousand layers of memrister cells can generate. Probably can incinerate the entire computer together with its metal casing. No doubt, 3D chips are the future of the chip industry, not only for the memory industry. Heat is the main reason why we still do not see many 3D chips in the market right now.

Firefox 4 beta gets Sync and Tab Candy Tab Panorama

Very Fast

The hardware acceleration rendering engine is very fast on graphical web pages.

Well done. Mozilla

Mozilla prepares second Firefox 4 beta launch

The best firefox release so far

I experienced little glitches when it was first installed, a couple of crashes. Since then, it works smoothly and reliably on all 3 of my windows OS (win2000, xp and win7) with no crash at all. My experience of Firefox 4, it is speedier and much more reliable at least when it is running Flash player comparing with Firefox 3 and before.

NHS loses massive Microsoft licensing rebate

Ditch windows and Office Altogether

Why not ditch MS software and go for Open Source and Java , once and for all. It can save NHS tons of Pounds

Mozilla stokes Firefox 4 with first beta build

Firefox4 is much faster vs FF3.6.6

I compare FF4 beta with FF 3.6.6 which I downloaded about 2 days ago, by opening 20 tabs in the same window frame and check its cpu utilizing rate . I found FF4 is roughly 30-40 % more efficient ( less cpu utilization).Well done, Mozilla has done a good job to improve FF4.

Big Blue boffins hatch dirt-cheap solar cells

It is not PV solar cell, but thin film coating solar cell.

I think some people got it wrong, What they mentioned as a solar cell is in fact a PV (photo-voltaic) device which is made of silicon crystal manufactured in a very expensive clean room environment.

What IBM does, instead of using silicone, they use copper, zinc, tin, selenium, and sulfur nano particles , turning them into an composition of emulsion, which then apply onto a substrate (i.e. glass, metal, or plastic film) by means of printing, spraying, spin-coating, just like ordinary paint. Which now we describe as 'Thin Film' solar cell technology.

There are similar technologies but using different materials such as CIGS (Copper, Indium, Gallium, and Selenium). but the problems with CIGS , some of the materials are rare earth metals, they are scare in supply and expensive, Even worse, these materials are often highly poisonous. The coating technique is slow and difficult to control.

IBM seems to have solved all these problems once and for all , although the conversion rate is only 9.6% ( the best conversion rate is around 20% for CIGS ).

Power7 v Power6 - it's all about the cache

typing mistake

David Halko

IT was a typing mistake, it should be

because of SOI's higher cost and difficulties of implementation

Intel is losing competitive edge

As far as competition is concerned, eDram is implemented on IBM's SOI technology. Yet Intel is choosing to use the bulk CMOS and HKMG for its Chips, because of higher cost and difficulties of implementing. That put Intel at disadvantages should AMD licenses IBM's technology, note that AMD is already a SOI shop.

eDram

How IBM's eDram compares with mass market Dram, Can any one enlighten me with insights?

More about eDram

I have found an interesting article about eDram

http://www.plans2reality.com/dox/eDRAMWhitePaper.pdf

Server virtualisation beyond the x86 environment

Computing is always segmented.

It is a golden rule in marketing , that is " you do not have a single product that suits the entire market"

One may argue that the computing industry is converging , but It will never consolidate into single market segment, since the market is diverged, you may have, telecommunication, financial ,retailing, public services or defense industries, all demanding different attributes of their computing environments. Just like you cannot compare X86 with Unix or with Mainframe.

Intel set for server chip blitz

Additional comparisons

The speed of the chip i.e. 1.6+ vs. 4+ G is not relevant if the jobs they handle are parallel in nature. However for serial computation , higher the speed ,greater the advantages.

What makes Power7 out run Itanium, are the design and technologies which IBM has used, namely

SOI to reduce current leakage

eDram to reduce number of transistor count by 2 thirds w.r.t. Sram, It would mean Power7 consuming less electricity even with a bigger L3 cache (32M) as compares to (30M) Tukwila.(transistor count of the chips are 1.2B to Power7 as to 2B to Tukwila). In theory Power7 can handle bigger jobs than Tukwila and faster because of higher CPU speed and bigger cache, while spending less on the electricity bills.

Oct cores , 4 threads/core of Power7 vs. Quad cores, 2 treads/core of Tukwila

32 treads/Power7 : 8 threads/Tukwila,

It is significant to their chip virtulisation performances. More threads the better.

IBM reloads Sun poaching gun

Kit

More to poach

According Larry , there are still 4000 customers still on Sun's account. May be they will switch to IBM soon.

IBM: Power7 to rollout throughout 2010

Power8

Shall we see IBM consolidating all of its P, I, and Z platforms on Power8 chips. Certainly, its a matter of time. If not the Power8, perhaps, it may be P9 or P.... whatever.

US spontaneous human combustion raygun video released

Demonstration

It is a demonstration of how high energy physics and microelectronics advance through all these decades. Started as laboratory device evolves into an airborne weapon with self sustained power supply , plus the state of the art electronics airborne targeting system. Hell knows how much money had spent on this monstrous weapon.

Ellison: Sunacle is an IBM killer

Kit

Its always easier saying than doing it . It all sounds like a sales rhetoric to me.

Google boss claims no sting from Bing - yet

search results for "the cost of cellulosic ethanol"

Just a search result for the test "the cost of cellulosic ethanol" on http://blindsearch.fejus.com

http://blindsearch.fejus.com/?q=cost+of+cellulosic+ethanol

and judge the search engines yourself.

Bing passes Yahoo! in Google runner-up stakes

Bing a better search engine ?

After reading all the positive comments on the web and install it into my Firefox . I took it to a trial run and compared it with Google's. The results were very disappointing. I just randomly input some words or phases to examined their differences. Sometimes, I just input names, regarding their spelling (might be wrong spelling). The result I got sometimes was irrelevant, and also short of contents. It did not correct my input mistakes as Google or Yahoo did. More important Bing did not able to comprehend long phases and responded only with a comment "We did not find any results for". While the result from Google were much more reasonable and more importantly 'RELATED' to my searches.

I also compared it with Yahoo., the results were more or less the same.

The conclusion I got. Bing does not live up to the expectation from what I read on the web, might be it is only a marketing hype.

Intel drags feet on Itanium quad-core (again)

The end in nigh

So does it mean the end for itanic is nigh, the news for the late delivery as well as the low tech 65nm for the construction of the chip (mind you, it is certain other server chip manufacturers will sure migrate to 45 or even 32nm architect in 2010) gives us a strong hint that Itanium is on the line of live and dead. HP must now be in deep thought as to their next move if itanium supply in the future is in doubt.

Microsoft soothes Vista pain with Bossploitation flick

Really creative

The song is much more creative than Microsoft.s products. MS should enter show business rather than software industry.

IBM blackballed in US federal ambush

Parochial justice

IBM is punished before the verdict is passed. Is it what justice meant?