Eclectic Views

    
In with the new...
  

    

   Right To Challenge Patents Eased

The US Constitution restricts the jurisdiction of federal courts to actual
cases or controversies; in the past that has been widely held to mean that a
party who has licensed rights from the holder of a patented idea cannot
challenge the validity of the patent without first breaking its contract,
for example by ceasing to pay license fees. The arguable practical effect of
this rule has been to intimidate licensees into compliance, even when they
believe the patent is invalid. Yesterday the US Supreme Court issued a rare
reversal of the US Court of Appeals' judgment in a patent case by
overturning that rule, holding 8-1 that "the holder of a patent license can
sue to challenge the patent's validity without first refusing to pay
royalties and putting itself in breach of the license agreement". Although
the decision related to medical technology and did not by itself dispose of
the specific dispute, the new rule should provide a way for many licensees
of doubtful patents to seek review. Interestingly, the lone dissenter was
Justice Clarence Thomas to the majority opinion by Justice Antonin Scalia.
  

    
I would give some serious money to see how Scalia and Thomas are
viewed in 50 years or so, and what percentage of their rulings were
later overturned by a new SCOTUS.
  

    

   FPGAs For The Rest of Us

The field programmable gate array computer chip is a powerful tool for
developing new systems, since its actual circuitry can be reconfigured
without fabricating new hardware. But they are much more expensive than
mass-produced single-design chips and are rarely made in mass for sale to
end users. Comes now a couple of physicists from New York (Stony Brook
University) who developed "a novel way to overlay a mesh of molecular scale
nanowires on top of a conventional chip circuit". In collaboration with H-P,
the team has developed a hybrid chip about a tenth the scale of present
chips [with the same computing power, presumably] which could extend the
streak of speed increases known as Moore's Law another "10 to 15 years". A
bonus is low power usage, since these circuits are "nonvolatile - they
consume power only when switching from one state to another."
  

    

   Open source gets European boost

From  http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/low/technology/6270657.stm

"A report funded by the European Commission concludes that the software
could offer considerable savings to organisations with little effect on
their business.  The report found that in 'almost all' cases long-term costs
could be reduced by switching from proprietary software produced by firms
such as Microsoft.  However, it warned that a move to open source could
increase short term costs....largely due to increased training for users of
the software.... But [surprise! Ed.] some proprietary manufacturers such as
Microsoft do not believe that open source always means cheaper."
  

    

   Vox Populi

As a 21st century adjunct to the letters-to-the-editor column, the San
Francisco Chronicle is "posting some of the voice mail messages left for
reporters and editors as audio files on its Web site, SFGate.com". The first
one was over whether the term "pilotless drone" (used by the Forest Service)
was a tautology.


   It Must Be True; It's On The Internet

According to an article today, "more than 100 judicial rulings have relied
on Wikipedia ... including 13 from circuit courts of appeal" though it says
the US Supreme Court has so far refrained from doing so. A recent case in
Alabama over the outcome of medical treatment relied on a definition from
the online encyclopedia, but it was overturned by a higher court which
declared the definition did not meet a high enough standard of reliability;
the appeals court based that judgment on an article on accuracy which it
found in, er, Wikipedia. A Tennessee appeals court used it for a definition
of "beverage" and a Federal District Court in Florida relied on it to
explain "'booty music' as played during a wet T-shirt contest" there, noting
that it "has a slightly higher dance tempo and occasional sexually explicit
lyrical content." Now we know.
  

    

   Rambus Guilty

The Federal Trade Commission has issued a final ruling that the memory-chip
company engaged in unlawful antitrust activity by hiding the fact that it
had patents on a form of memory being considered for an industry standard.
From the decision: "Rambus's conduct was calculated to mislead JEDEC [the
Joint Electron Device Engineering Council] members by fostering the belief
that Rambus neither had, nor was seeking, relevant patents that would be
enforced against JEDEC-compliant products." Rambus has been ordered to hire
a compliance officer to ensure future disclosures but the wider significance
of the decision, according to the attorney who wrote an amicus curiae brief
for JEDEC, should be to deter "patent ambushes" and resolve them more
quickly when discovered. JEDEC's filing is at
 http://www.ftc.gov/os/adjpro/d9302/060915jedecamicusbrief.pdf
in Adobe PDF format, an industry standard...
  

    

   Quote Of The Day

Edward Rothstein, on trying to build his own PC from scratch:

"Three decades ago, one less powerful would have filled a room, so I didn't
lack appreciation for the technological marvel; but the crudity of the
operations made it seem as if I were striking flint to run an M.R.I."
  

    
"Thoughts on Music", by Steve Jobs
http://www.apple.com/hotnews/thoughtsonmusic/
  

    
crudity?
  

    
> crudity

"I like the science-fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke's famous dictum that any
sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Here,
sufficiently crude technology seemed indistinguishable from carpentry - or
plumbing. The chip and board designers Intel and Nvidia were the real
creative forces, determining the logic of this construction. But at a
certain point, when I tried to remove a tiny piece of plastic that fit over
two prongs and move it to another two while squeezing my fingers between two
intertwined cables, the computer's primitiveness became overwhelmingly
clear."
  

    

   Multi-multi-processors

The first computer to achieve over a trillion floating-point operations per
second (FLOPS) was ASCI Red in 1996. (Despite its name it was not actually
used for text communication with the Soviets.) According to the BBC, it
"took up more than 2,000 square feet, was powered by almost 10,000 Pentium
Pro processors, and consumed more than 500 kilowatts of electricity". This
week Intel debuted a working prototype of its "Teraflop Chip" which reaches
that level on a single 80-processor chip that draws just 62 watts, does not
require water cooling, and is expected to "be used widely in standard
desktop, laptop and server computers within five years". Besides the current
generation of CPUs with two or four processors or "cores", special purpose
chips already exist such as the one in NVidia's GeForce 880 graphics board
with 128 cores and Cisco's routers with the 192-core Metro chip. While raw
computing power is ceasing to be a constraint on speed gains, other
bottlenecks need to be addressed. One is data movement, between the cores
and to and from memory; the Teraflop Chip "contains an internal packet
router in each processor tile" which facilitates data transfer rates of up
to 80 billion bytes per second between cores, and an interface that enables
a memory chip to be stacked directly above the CPU to minimize the distance
signals must travel. The second hurdle is software; the complexity of
coordinating work among 80 cores is vastly greater than between 2 or 4, and
has the potential to negate the improvement in hardware if not solved.
  

    

It's weird that everyone talks about the issues with large multicore
systems but the Sun "Niagara" servers are just wonderful for web servers.
Sure if you have a single monolithic program that you need to parallelize,
it's an issue. But most situations are not like that at all - you either
have a regular computer with many processes or a program with multiple
threads if not both. Given a decent OS, they run happily and fast.
  

    
This is just a guess without experience to back it up, but I would expect
servers, routers, and graphics processors to have inherent multi-tasking
responsibilities based on the nature of their work. User-oriented computers
like desktop and laptop systems, less so. The number of times I heard "run
an anti-virus program while you do a spreadsheet" leads me to wonder if
these article writers couldn't think of a second example.
  

    
It could be general laziness. When I'm discussing how software changes and 
how migration isn't simple, I always mention hypercard stacks. I'm sure 
there are a host of other examples, but in the circles I've been using 
this example (museums, archives, educators), everyone immediately gets 
what I mean. And I'm pretty sure that it was someone else who suggested 
"hypercard" as a good example for this purpose to me.

I occasionally think of worse examples (most of my audience will not 
remember CP/M and the disk format wars), but this one works. I bet other 
folks use it, too.
  

    
It's an interesting issue. When I open the Task Manager I see numerous open
processes, but they are taking zero percent of the CPU. Perhaps when
computing resources become more abundant through multiple-core chips,
software designers will take advantage of that as they did when cable and
DSL offered always-on connections to the Internet; but off the top I don't
see many obvious opportunities on end-user systems.
  

    

And further in the speed department:

   IBM Announces Ten-fold Improvement In DRAM

Their researchers described today at the Solid State Circuits conference a
memory technology capable of 2-nanosecond cycle times, dramatically better
than what is commercially available now. Unlike Intel's plan to stack the
memory chip above the CPU, IBM may also integrate it into its processors for
large-scale caching functions.
  

    

   Shortcut To Speed

Consider the triangle, the right triangle that is. Going from one corner to
another via the hypotenuse can be as little as about 70 percent of the
distance involved in going via the corner with the 90-degree angle. But
according to a story in today's paper, "Manhattan Rules" have applied to
chips, meaning that connections between switches had to go vertically or
horizontally and never northwest so to speak, despite the example of
Broadway. With a count of transistors in some chips that "has surpassed the
human population of the planet" and "a mile of wires" (albeit very narrow
ones; human hair, blah blah), a 30% improvement could be dramatic. Cadence
Design Systems claims to have pioneered such a layout, soon to be employed
in cell-phone chips by Agere and routers by Teranetics, that reduces power
consumption dramatically, though rival Synopsys scoffs. The article ends by
suggesting that major chip-design innovations may be an endangered species,
as "the ruthless pace of chip-making advances ... makes engineers leery of
trying alternative approaches" lest they follow a false scent. (Even if
that's true of corporate development labs, it's hard to imagine universities
and basic research places being so intimidated, though.)
  

    
Intel can afford to follow a few false scents, and can't afford to let any
promising ones go untried.
  

    

   Next, The iPod/Pacemaker

If you see cardiac patients break-dancing down Market Street don't be
surprised; convergence is running amok these days. The hand-held GPS with
satellite views is not so bad (DeLorme Earthmate PN-20) - real men don't use
maps anyway - but the other item takes some sort of prize. That would be the
Tiger Electronics "musical toothbrush" available at www.toothtunes.com which
plays 2 minutes of alleged music "transferred through the brush tip into the
teeth and right into the inner ear". (Sticking the unit in your ear would
eliminate the dentition conduit but the brush is too big; perhaps in version
2.0.  And how long before they start to carry advertising?) The purchaser
cannot download music to it, but is able to choose from among 17 artists
including Kiss, Hilary Duff, the Black Eyed Peas, and the Village People.
The ostensible goal is to encourage the user, presumably a child, to
continue brushing until the selection stops, but the reporter notes
"unfortunately you can hear better when not brushing".
  

    

   The Times They Are A'Changing

An article in the paper refers to the effects of the upcoming "Mini-Y2K",
namely the rescheduling of daylight savings time to start three weeks
earlier (and end a week later) than per last year's rules. It quotes an
Energy Department assessment that "three one-hundredths of a percent of
annual electricity use" may be saved by getting up in the dark a la January.
Other effects, besides putting this country more out of synch with Europe
and the like who shift on March 25, and other continents who don't bother,
could be felt in electronic devices with internal clocks.  E-mail and
calendar programs are cited, along with hotel wake-up-call services. (Of
course, what better excuse for missing an early meeting?) Least trivial
seems to be the impact on electric utilities with meters that charge varying
rates depending on the time of day; in most cases, those gizmos can't be set
remotely, so a technician has to go out to each and reprogram the cuckoos.
One wonders why the billing software can't take that into account, but this
possibility is not addressed. So far, there has been no rush of best-sellers
predicting the End Of Civilization as there was in 1999.
  

    

   Microsoft Shows Off Intrusive New Search Tool

According to Nielsen, industry leader Google receives 54 percent of all
search requests and underdog Microsoft (a phrase rarely seen) only 9%.
TechFest, a three-day event in Redmond to display new MS software, included
a demonstration of the company's response, called Personalized Search. Asked
to locate Web references to Michael Jordan, "by culling through local
information on her [MS presenter Susan Dumais's] hard drive, the program was
able to discern she was interested in the machine-learning expert at
Berkeley, not the basketball player".  I'm not sure that's going to be as
popular as Microsoft thinks: a search for Michael Jackson would have to
rummage through your hard drive to see if you're more interested in single-
malt Scotch or pedophilia. And of course you agreed to those license terms
that let the program share whatever it finds with Microsoft...
  

    

   A Cure For Spam?

Not e-mail spam alas, but for "Web spam", or "junk Web pages created only to
lure search-engine users to advertisements". A paper co-produced by
researchers at UC Davis and Microsoft, available at
http://www.cs.ucdavis.edu/~hchen/paper/www07.pdf
found that 30 percent of search results for terms like "ring tone" directed
users to "fake pages created by spammers" consisting entirely of ads.
Overall, 11% of the thousand keywords they tried sent them to spam pages.
But there are choke points unlike e-mail spam: just two Web-hosting
companies accounted for the bulk of the pages, and one of them (ISPrime)
says it has terminated the account of the single customer responsible.
Another site called blogspot.com run by some outfit named Google was also
cited; the company "would not comment for the record on its efforts to
combat such practices."


P.S.  On its new Classical Blowout section featuring budget music CDs,
Amazon offers one titled "Famous Gregorian Chants".  Reminds me of those
jokes about the world's shortest book.
  

    

   Fastest Supercomputer Is Built In Japan

Fujitsu has built a machine several times faster than any other in the
world.  Initially designed for complex climate modeling calculations, it has
been offered for sale on Ebay; during initial tests a technician gave it a
sudoku puzzle to solve and now it won't do anything else.


   New Issues at Hewlett-Packard

The company's chairman admits kidnapping and torturing board members, but
says it was approved by in-house counsel hired from the Justice Department.


   Exposi Site To Debut

Created from "before" photographs at Weight Watchers International, it will
be called YouTub.com.


   Operating System Put Into Public Domain

IBM goes open-source with FreeMVS, in an effort to attract users to its
boxcar-sized mainframes. According to CEO Samuel Palmisano, all the parking
lots in East Fishkill are filled with the unsold behemoths.


   Government Tests Alternative Energy Sources

Sail-powered battleships served Admiral Nelson well and it is hoped the USS
Iraq, named after the new 51st state, will match the HMS Victory; but
efforts to extend the initiative to the legislative branch have stalled on
the realization that Congress already runs on wind power.
  

    
A fine tradition.
  

    
And I see that today's NASA Astronomy Picture Of The Day at
http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/astropix.html  features a quidditch match
outside the space station.