Friday March 21, 2008

- Fans with no moving parts - Lionel - 13:40:59

Source: Dailytech

If the computer industry has recently decided to focus on power consumption and its components in order to decrease or contain it, they still need to be actively cooled by fans which are noise generators.
Researchers have developed a ventilation system totally devoid of moving parts.


The airflow is generated simply by turning the assembly. The difficulty of the exercise is to increase the maximum current in the system and thereby create the maximum air flow without ever causing arcing which would destroy the components supposed to be cooled.
The airflow achieved is far higher than that generated by a conventional fan, up to 35x (surface equivalent), according to researchers.
A very impressive video shows how it works:
fan.swf
They hope that this technology will be rapidly accepted and hope it will at the outset be included on the chips so that they are self-cooled.

[translation by jeremy]

- The first DisplayPort cards are here - Lionel - 13:32:04

The VESA association announced that it has issued the first DisplayPort specifications. It concerns the HD Radeon 3000 chipset and integrated video cards AMD 780G.
Although these are the first certified products, others are already on sale, such as monitors from Dell and Samsung.
The displayPort, legitimate successor of DVI, is going to have to fight HDMI in order to prevail. While displayPort has been late starting, it has the main advantage of not requiring the payment of royalties.
Eventually, one of these two formats will replace the aging DVI. La Mode is now small and compact cables simplifying the connection of peripherals while having very good data transfer.
Just as with the gradual disappearance of VGA, we should begin by finding hybrids video cards with a DVI connector and DisplayPort connector.

[translation by jeremy]

- A program to circumvent BD+ - Lionel - 13:24:02

It is now a few months since the AACS experienced a crisis when the protection of the same name was bypassed with ridiculous ease even though it was supposed to be infallible.
With the victory of Blu-ray, the Majors had hoped that the establishment of BD + would allow them to have additional respite.
However, in late 2007, the company whiwh makes editing software AnyDVD announced that it had found a way to circumvent the BD +. They have now proven it and have started to market their software capable of recopying any capacity Blu-ray.
The BD + system is based on a virtual machine loaded on the hard drive, it will certainly be easy to exploit the loophole in the coming discs being sold, but it will be once again a means of another step in a battle with no end.

If we can understand the position of Majors who refuse to leave themselves open to looting, it is still difficult to sympathise with them totally because these protections also complicate the lives of consumers, who must have a compatible drive, a compatible television set unless computer is new, and a new monitor.
It must be remembered that the first person to have find a way to circumvent the AACS protection was someone frustrated to see that their equipment did not allow them to read the media that they had bought.

[translation by jeremy]

- Microsoft and Intel want to improve the support for multi-CPUs - Lionel - 10:30:11

With the Powermac G4 bi-CPU, Apple had made a precursor to computing for the masses. Nowadays this has become more general. It is difficult to follow Moore's law with just one core, thus the constructors of the processors have started to push in the direction of multiplication of the cores. Intel and AMD propose processors with 4 cores, soon 6 and Intel among its prototypes has something that has 80 processors...
On paper, the cpu power is strongly increased,however in practice this is not always the case since few applications are able to draw the best from these configurations.
Programming for this is enormously complicated. It is necessary to cut the program in smaller and smaller pieces and then share them out among the cores, and then collect together the results.The work of optimization becomes more paramount, and it becomes more and more complicated.
In order to clear the ground, Intel and Microsoft have joined the university of Illinois and Berkeley to work on simplifying the optimization of the software. 22 M$ will be spent over 5 years on this project.
If a solution is not found, the work of Intel could be wasted. Who needs a personal computer that has 4,8 or 16 cores if this does not bring about an improvement of performance?

[translation by crispin]

- The iPhone encourages web surfing - Lionel - 09:45:03

Source : Informationweek

Those lucky guys with an iPhone know full well; contrary to the immense majority of mobile telephones, one can easily surf the web in a comfortable way without having truncated and deformed pages.
Several studies have proven that the iPhone has opened up an unprecedented on-the-go use the web.
A new study released byM:Metrics gives another hit on this nail. According to a survey, 85% of iPhone users have used it to surf the web in January.
Paradoxically, this use is ahead of watching video (31%) and even listening to music(75%).
With such a study of use, the Albis commission will surely lower the royalty on the iPhone!

[translation by crispin]