Over the past week parts of the blogosphere have been buzzing over the discovery of a 1.5-meter Ethernet cable that is being sold for the insane price of $499.

The manufacturer is Denon, and the target customer is the “audio enthusiast.” Apparently “audio enthusiast” is Denonese for “sucker.”

The original listing for the product is unchanged, as if the company were unaware of the guffaws emanating from the geekier side of the Internet. It appears that the first discovery was publicized on CrunchGear, although I also saw listings on UberReview, Wired, and eventually Slashdot, among other places. You know how these things go.

Denon’s description of the cable is priceless:

“Denon’s 1.5 meter (59 in.) ultra premium Denon Link cable was designed for the audio enthusiast. Made from high purity copper wire and high performance connection parts, the AK-DL1 will bring out all the nuances in digital audio reproduction from any of our Denon DVD players with the Denon Link feature. Attention to detail when building this cable was used by employing high quality insulation, tin-bearing alloy shielding and woven jacketing to reduce vibration and to add durability. Additionally, signal directional markings are provided for optimum signal transfer. Rounded plug levers help prevent breakage.”

Nuances. In a digital signal, where bits are bits. And thank goodness the copper wire is high in purity. Maybe that’s where the high price comes from, what with copper costs being what they are today.

Obviously, this kind of inflated sense of worth isn’t something you can get away with in the enterprise networking realm. Or is it?

TAKEN FROM www.networkworld.com

West Lafayette (IN) – Researchers from Purdue University claim they are getting closer to develop a much more efficient cooling system that the traditional heatsink-fan design used in many computers today. Suresh Garimella and Eckhard Groll say they can miniaturize traditional refrigerator designs to become small enough to fit in desktop computers or even notebooks.

The design the two researchers are working on is a type of vapor-compression refrigeration, which is commonly used for large-scale air-conditioning as well as your refrigerator at home. The basic concept of this technology uses a circulating liquid in different pressure states to remove heat from a device.

Typically, vapor-compression refrigeration technology, involves four main components: An evaporator, a compressor, a condenser, and an expansion valve. A refrigeration cycle begins with the refrigerant entering the compressor as a superheated vapor at low pressure. The liquid exits the compressor as vapor with higher pressure and enters the condenser, where it is condensed as heat is removed to cooling water or via air and an assisting fan to the outside of a casing. The liquid exits the condenser as a high-pressure liquid. The pressure decreases as it flows through the expansion valve where portions of the liquid turn into cold vapor. The remaining liquid then is directed to the evaporator, where the low pressure liquid is vaporized as heat is transferred from the refrigerated space. The cycle is complete by sending the liquid back into the compressor.

The idea of using this common refrigeration technology for smaller electronic devices is not entirely new and has been discussed especially in the past 8 years in numerous scientific papers. However, the challenge appears to have been to understand how these systems can work on a small scale and how especially compressors can be miniaturized.
Garimella and Groll from Purdue now claim that they have succeeded in designing tiny compressors that pump refrigerants using penny-size diaphragms. The elastic membranes are made of ultra-thin sheets of a plastic called polyimide and coated with an electrically conducting metallic layer. The metal layer allows the diaphragm to be moved back and forth to produce a pumping action using electrical charges, or “electrostatic diaphragm compression.” So far, it is only one part of the refrigeration cycle, but the scientists believe that such a system can be made small enough to fit into laptops.

Unlike conventional cooling systems, which use a fan to circulate air through finned devices called heat sinks attached to computer chips, miniature refrigeration would dramatically increase how much heat could be removed, Garimella said.

TAKEN FROM www.tgdaily.com

Mountain View (CA) - When we talk about processor performance, most of the performance typically comes from the depth of the pipeline, the number of cores, the size and the type of the cache or the   clock speed. However, we rarely here about the way how a processor actually communicates between these components and such technologies usually do not make it into marketing brochures. But Intel has an idea that could change this scenario: The company plays with the thought of integrating DRAM into the CPU.

One of the most important goals when designing a new chip is to keep the available processing units as busy as possible. One way to achieve this goal is to feed enough data into the cores as quickly as possible through improved inter-core communication. The progress from one processor generation to another is obvious: For example, while the 65 nm Kentsfield quad-core provided a bandwidth of about 8 to 9 GB/s, the 45 nm Harpertown chip offers 18-20 GB/s.  
 
At last week’s Research@Intel Day event, we spotted a technology that holds the potential to multiply the available bandwidth within a processor. In our opinion, this technology is actually the most impressive research we saw on that day. The reason why you may not have heard about this technology is because Intel did not specifically promote it and did not even mention it on its  “Demo Cheat-Sheets” given out to journalists and analysts.

A small research team inside Intel succeeded in reducing the size of DRAM cells to only two transistors and completely removing the capacitors. Conceivably, these two achievements could change the way how we will use DRAM in the future: For example, expensive and complex SRAM (static RAM) cells could be entirely removed from a CPU and replaced with DRAM.

In contrast to Intel’s two-transistor (“2T”) DRAM bit cell, SRAM usually requires six transistors per stored bit. Of course, there is also 1T-SRAM (which uses only one cell), but this type is very rare (and used for example in Nintendo game consoles such as the GameCube and Wii).

SRAM has some advantages over DRAM, including lower power consumption, higher speed and no need to be refreshed. However, SRAM is known to be much more expensive than DRAM and not as dense.

Intel said that it was able to fine tune its DRAM design and hit a physical clock of 2 GHz using a 65 nm manufacturing process. The resulting 2T-DRAM offers a stunning bandwidth of 128 GB/s. If Intel is successful to take the clock speed up to the level of its QX9770/9775 processors, the bandwidth would climb to 204.8 GB/s. In other words: Intel would gain more than a 10x improvement over its current L2 cache technology. More importantly: This approach would completely change the programming model since there are no longer any concerns over cache misses.

The scientists believe they will be able to use 45 nm High-k technology to match and exceed Intel’s existing clock speed design. And as a next step, DRAM cells are planned to be stacked into Intel’s Terascale processors. The Terascale processor itself may be seeing a migration to a massive number of x86 mini-cores – which, sooner or later, may reveal the successor of the architectures of Larrabee and Itanium. In case you are wondering: Yes, it looks like there will be a combination of a CPU and the upcoming GPU/accelerator.

Seeing 32nm wafers at Intel’s Research Day was nice, but at the end of the day, 32 nm is just another manufacturing process. DRAM on the processor is actually what would make the greatest difference in performance in our opinion. According to two scientists we talked to, the potential bandwidth would quickly introduce us to the era of Terascale. If software developers can access a low-latency  200 GB/s bandwidth, many of today’s parallel programming problems could be resolved, since a cycle-miss could be reduced to near zero.

TAKEN FROM www.tgdaily.com

Normally supercomputers are housed in high security government buildings which are specifically built and designed to accommodate such mega structures but the MareNostrum in Barcelona Spain the 9th largest supercomputer in the world, fifth fastest in the world and the largest in Europe is installed in a Chapel. The supercomputer consists of 2560 JS21 blade computing nodes, each with 2 dual-core IBM 64-bit PowerPC 970MP processors running at 2.3 GHz for 10240 CPUs in total. It has 20 TB of RAM and 280 TB of external disk storage for more persistent storage. Running on SUSE Linux it is capable of 62.63 teraflops and a peak performance of 94.21 teraflops. It may look beautiful from the top but when you dig deeper it gets more typical.
MareNostrum’s Myrinet interconnect fabric requires four cabinets. Myricom did a nice job of reducing the cable count as much as they could by using quad-link ribbon cables between their switch elements. But with 12 separate switch elements in the fabric that means they still have a lot of cables and more cables means more connectors, more points of potential failure. They also use one cable per compute node, as is typically done in cluster configurations. Lots more cables, lots more connectors.

TAKEN FROM www.newlaunches.com

TAKEN FROM computerworld.name/asus-wooden-laptop/

(Credit: Dell)

Dell isn’t exactly known for its cutting-edge fashion, but it’s definitely creating a buzz for the New Year with its “Crystal LCD” monitor. To look at the flash ad on Dell’s site, you’d think it was a new Mercedes that was being rolled out.

First impressions seem to be somewhat mixed, as Boing Boing and others have criticized this museum piece as being all about show and short on specs, notably its size and resolution (22 inches, 1,680×1,050). And Dell is baiting the detractors by adorning it with a price tag of $1,199–which, as Gizmodo notes, is $899 more than the company’s other LCDs with similar technicals.

But as slaves to fashion (in our minds if not appearance), we have to side with the fans of this beautiful screen for purely superficial reasons if nothing else. From the Webcam on its forehead to the four speakers embedded in its ultra-thin 4-millimeter-thick glass, this limited-edition monitor is a stunner. The metal tripod alone is enough to turn heads.

taken from crave.cnet.com

If you are tired of industrial looking black and silver for your external hard drives - golden idea for you – external hard drive in a wavy gold exterior that looks way cool

The Golden Disk includes LaCie one touch backup software and works with windows 2000, XP and Mac OS X. The connection to your PC is via USB 2.0. Inside the lovely gold case is a 500GB hard drive with a 7200rpm rotational speed and the ability to write at up to 480MB/sec. The drive measures in at 1.57” x 4.4” x 7.4” and weighs 31.7 ounces.

TAKEN FROM computers-review.com

By Brian Proffitt

By Mark Hinkle

Bill Gates steps down as the Chairman of Microsoft on July 1st to transition to full time philanthropic efforts with the Gates Foundation. However, I wonder how effective Bill will be other than writing checks. You see Bill’s never played well with others.

• Microsoft v. United States
  
• Microsoft v. AOL (Netscape)
• Microsoft v. Apple
• Microsoft v. Sun

At a speech on Monday for the Institute of Systems Biology he gave a speech followed by a Q&A session he reportedly answered one poor chap’s questions on whether open source methodologies would be used in his research.

Gates responded with the following:

“There’s free software and then there’s open source,” he suggested, noting that Microsoft gives away its software in developing countries. With open source software, on the other hand, “there is this thing called the GPL, which we disagree with.”

Open source, he said, creates a license “so that nobody can ever improve the software,” he claimed, bemoaning the squandered opportunity for jobs and business. (Yes, Linux fans, we’re aware of how distorted this definition is.) He went back to the analogy of pharmaceuticals: “I think if you invent drugs, you should be able to charge for them,” he said, adding with a shrug: “That may seem radical.”

Touché Bill. Of course competing with the monopoly that is Microsoft requires radical measures. Competition among desktop operating systems is pretty much non-existent. It even looks like Windows will someday become the OS of choice on the current Linux-based  OLPC project.

Now children in the poorest nations in the world who might have been given a chance to learn about free and open source software will be given Windows. Hooking them early, like handing out crack cocaine in kindergarten and waiting until graduation to start selling to the addicts.

Without compromise there is no progress. In the software world Gates was the Godfather he didn’t need to work with anyone until the Justice Department ruled against him. Even as the richest man in the world he’s got to work together with researchers and others if he wants to be successful. Too bad he didn’t learn anything about open source’s collaborative values it might have served him well as he tries to help cure disease and improve world health standards.

I have to wonder if he will be able to make the transition from dictator to do-gooder or if he will just write checks?

For more Mark Hinkle, visit his Socialized Software blog.

Taken from http://blog.linuxtoday.com

Flickr, Yahoo’s photo sharing service, has rolled out a new website dedicated to Flickr’s popular API tools. The new site, Code.Flickr, offers developers a place to review API information, discuss tools in the forums and of course rant about the future of Flickr development.

There’s also a new development blog and a public SVN repository for Flickr’s open source efforts, like the cross-platform Uploadr tool which is built on Mozilla’s XULRunner.

To date the Flickr API offers 109 methods for developers looking to build tools based on the photo sharing site. And build they have; there are thousands of Flickr tools out there, offering everything from simple widgets to embed photos on your blog, to full-fledge desktop editing and uploading apps.

It would nice if Code.Flickr offered some way to search through all the various applications and API tools, but, at least for now, that’s not part of the site (there’s still the featured section on the main Flickr Services page, which offers links to the more popular third-party apps).

However, even if it’s missing a third-party tool search, the Code.Flickr still has plenty of juicy info for aspiring Flickr API developers. If you’ve been having trouble with Flickr’s API, the company says that the new development blog will be offering tutorials on the various API methods. If there’s a particular area that confuses you, post your request in this thread so the development bloggers can help you out.

The new Flickr Code site is a great resource for developers and it provides a nice single source for anyone looking to get started using the API.

[via the Flickr Blog]
Special thanks to wired.com