The LambCutlet Disorganisation

Fear the grackle!

:D :D :D

It’s been speculated for some 9 months that Intel’s forthcoming 90nm processor using the NetBurst® architecture, codenamed “Prescott” was to feature 64 bit extensions to the x86 ISA under the codename “Yamhill” not once but twice.

X-Bit Labs have the following:

American Technology Research believes it is likely that Intel Corporation will unveil a 64-bit x86 chip in Q1 or Q2 of 2004, which would be a huge endorsement of 64-bit computing; however, the firm says it will take Intel close to one full year to build a support infrastructure of mainboards, chipsets, and graphics accelerators, leaving the 2004 playing field wide for Advanced Micro Devices who already has its 64-bit chips rapidly ramping up in production.

Obviously, this makes the whole Pentium V and Windows Elements thing and the news that Windows XP/Server 2003 for Extended Systems has been delayed all the more interesting.

Only time will tell as to how this particular conspiracy theory pans out… :D

Plasma and LCD displays never really tickled me as the former eats power and the latter suffers from poor colour fidelity and pixel response time in comparison to trusty old CRTs.

The two technologies I’m keen on getting my grubby mitts on are OLED/LEP displays and FED displays. SEDs are a form of FED, but rather than using the typical Carbon nanotubes, it’s a much simpler idea where there are two electrodes separated by a gap of just a few nanometers. Electrons tunnel through this gap via Quantum effects and some of those electrons are accelerated via an electric field to strike phosphor dots at one end, causing light to be emitted.

Canon and Toshiba will be showing a prototype in the Winter Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas this January 2004.

Canon and Toshiba will start selling the large-sized flat TVs in 2005, according to a report in a local Japanese newspaper.

The SED display, which is based on field emission, is Canon’s proprietary technology that Canon has been working on since the mid 80s. The company showed a 10-inch prototype panel at SID in 1998. At that time, Canon had been working with Victor Company of Japan, Ltd. (JVC) to implement the SED technology into a TV set. JVC eventually pulled out of the venture.

Canon and Toshiba officially announced the partnership in SED development and business opportunities in June 1999 when it showing a 10-inch prototype. From the beginning both companies aimed the technology at TV applications and had planned to establish a joint venture production company. The two companies said then that they were going to develop panels of 30-inch to probably 50-inch diagonal size.

The SED is said to have advantages in productivity, performance and sizes vis-a-vis existing flat panels such as LCDs and plasma. SEDs can be fabricated mostly using ordinary printing methods. Because SEDs drive electrons at about 10kV — close to that of CRTs — they can use phosphors widely used in CRTs. This makes them CRT equivalent self-emitting displays and very thin: a 40-inch sized panel can be no thicker than 10 mm, weigh less than 20kg and consume around 60W.

… and the cool bit:

Electron emission by SEDs is achieved through the simple construction of a slit between the electrodes. Canon has paid particular attention to this point, and, thanks to a screen printing method that uses wiring linking the many electron emitters, we were able to make the construction more efficient and to enlarge screens at little cost.

Canon has also succeeded in applying ink jet printing technology to create ultrafine-particle film, and has developed a high-performance electron emitter. SEDs also consume low amounts of energy. They convert electrical energy to light with an emission efficiency of 5 lm/W or higher, resulting in energy consumption that is roughly one-half that of a large-screen CRT and about one-third that of a plasma display panel. Accordingly, it is possible to enjoy 42 inch screen images while consuming less power than that required to run a 36 inch CRT TV.

Yummy. :D

Kernel.org have the goods we’ve been waiting for. The world of Linux 2.6 brings a whole myriad of new things for developers and users. Joseph Pranevich provides us a detailed write up on the changes since Linux 2.4.

Although it seems like only yesterday that we were booting up our first Linux 2.4 systems, time has ticked by and the kernel development team has just released the 2.6 kernel to the public. This document is intended as a general overview of the features in the new kernel release, with a heavy bias toward i386 Linux. Please also be aware that some of the “new” features discussed here may have been back-ported to Linux 2.4 after first appearing in Linux 2.6, either officially or by a distribution vendor. I have also included information on a handful of cases where a new feature originated during the maintenance cycle of Linux 2.4, and those will be marked as appropriate in the text.

Improvements including and not limited to such things as:

• Scalability downwards and upwards with embedded systems, NUMA systems and Bigger Iron
• Improvements in the support of hyperthreading where a single pysical processor can execute more than one thread at a time and presents itself as two or more logical processing units
• Interactivity and responsiveness has been tackled with changes to the Input/Output system and sporting of a kernel that is finally preemptible
• Modularised subsystem and Unified Device Model
• Support of new technologies such as USB2, Wireless Devices, S-ATA and so on
• Filesystem support extended such as XFS and ReiserFS v4 along with a new partitio table scheme called “Windows’ Logical Disk Manager” née “Dynamic Disks” introduced in Windows 2000
• Audio & Multimedia improvements with ALSA, Video4Linux and built-in support for DVB hardware
• Improvements to the networking stack and network filesystems
• User access to the system is now finer grained eliminating potential root exploits
• Virtualized Linux where the operating system can run within itself as a user-mode application useful for development or security analysis

There’s been a whole torrent of interesting things over the last week or so of a geeky nature which gets the inner-geek all excited, so in no particular order:

Updated: 2004-02-28 19:01 UTC by Jonathan Stanley

As people seem to have been referencing through this post to one of the three segments… I’ve split them of into entries in their own right:

• Linux 2.6.0 released!
• Surface-conduction Electron-emitter Displays…
• Intel has consumer 64 bits?

Hurrah! Come 9th of December, I’ll be working at RS Components as a Media Content Editor. It’s going to be a pretty fun packed role, since the 6 month long project I’ll be working on is a major core revamp of how RS Components presents information to the public to sell it’s wares and to lay down some key systems and methodology in work for future projects within the company.

This obviously means I won’t be continuing the vocational training I requested through New Deal so on Monday I’ll finalizing various bits of paperwork with them. Plus I’ll be saying my goodbyes to the wonderful people at Careers Development Group and Marie Curie Cancer Care that day too.

They along with my two New Deal Advisors have made this rather difficult year that bit more bearable… Thank you Bernise, Sarah, Lyn E., Tracey, Elizabeth, Babs, Eve, Anne, Lisa, Angela, Lynn, Cherie, Margot, Marea, Usha, Mollie, Ruth, Christine and other people at Marie Curie Cancer Care plus those elsewhere that I may have unwittingly overlooked! :D

I’m not sure what happens after June 2004 during which my contract at RS Components ends (my crystal ball probably needs recharging or a good kick)… There may be permanent work with them on new projects or perhaps I will work for yet another company. Last but not least, I may finally do what I’ve said I’ll do and be my own boss and set up a company. I have some ideas as to what I could do that shouldn’t be a financial disaster… Only time will tell I guess. :D

I had actually read about this back in the beginning of November and I thought I’ll share it with you all incase you hadn’t got wind of it already… It kicks arse. :D

Joe Maddalone, the one whom stumbled across this writes:

I, like so many other’s, have struggled with ways to test designs, css, etc. in multiple versions of Internet Explorer. Usually the only solutions were to have multiple OS’s installed on multiple partitions, or running some sort of emulation software such as VMWare.

While working on a project recently that I realized at the last second would be running in Internet Explorer 5.5, I had an immediate need to test this application in this browser.

So what? you may say… but there were wider implications which would prove oh-so-helpful for those of us that need to test websites in multiple versions of Internet Explorer.

Microsoft Corp. today announced how it will respond to the August jury decision in the Eolas patent lawsuit. The steps include modest changes to Microsoft® Windows® and Internet Explorer as well as measures that Web developers and others who use Internet Explorer technology can take to ameliorate or eliminate the impact of the ruling. Microsoft is providing full documentation for these changes to help guide Web developers and other developers that use its Internet Explorer technology to create the best possible user experience. Other companies providing specialized documentation related to this change are listed on the Web site at http://msdn.microsoft.com/ieupdate/.

… and the clever stuff:

The solution developed by Microsoft has two main parts:

• First, Microsoft will make minor changes to Internet Explorer’s handling of some Web pages that use ActiveX® Controls, such as Macromedia Flash, Apple QuickTime, RealNetworks RealOne, Adobe Acrobat Reader, Sun Java Virtual Machine and Microsoft Windows Media® Player. It is currently anticipated that this change will be deployed by early next year. If Web developers have not updated their Web pages using the techniques suggested by Microsoft and others, users may see a simple dialog box before the browser loads the ActiveX Control.
• Second, Microsoft and other industry partners are working to provide documentation for Web developers that describe how to author Web pages so the dialog box would not be necessary.

Following on from Joe Maddalone’s discovery, Ryan Parman decided to be an enterprising individual and offered pre-changed versions of Internet Explorer to download. Yours truly has offered to help out on the bandwidth side of things and the files have been mirrored on here. :D

Anyhow… the files for various versions of Win32:

Windows 2000/XP/2003 Server

Standalone Internet Explorer 6.0 Eolas Edition

3.41 MiB - md5sum: bd2f999d9a943a76cf7b73553e75fea4

Standalone Internet Explorer 5.5 SP2

3.51 MiB - md5sum: 80b4823b3d7d37f26cf0e6cb0424bf95

Standalone Internet Explorer 5.01 SP2

2.93 MiB - md5sum: 9be11fba34c844e4f39220b9b6c8cc6c

Standalone Internet Explorer 4.01

2.38 MiB - md5sum: d043238cee0c07a323bd1246bb131c08

Standalone Internet Explorer 3.0

909.4 kiB - md5sum: 104b837c9d0463c364265c756e0576d4

Windows 98/98SE/ME

Standalone Internet Explorer 5.5 SP2

3.51 MiB - md5sum: b9a2553040c153129fd281872ff6b072

Standalone Internet Explorer 5.01 SP2

2.93 MiB - md5sum: 0b04bb907a4ec53c2e16c36213b7c2a8

Standalone Internet Explorer 4.01

2.36 MiB - md5sum: 998c359860513debaae7e420f434b71d

Standalone Internet Explorer 3.0

827.6 kiB - md5sum: 4a59eca298c26de0aeee7e4d96e24c23

There you go, couldn’t be a happier bunny now can we? Just unzip them to somewhere reasonably sensible on your system… the Internet Explorer folder is sensible enough. :D

Oh and Luke Redpath has created a rather spiffy set of colour-coded icons for the various Internet Explorer installs. :D