Archive for August, 2004
August 31, 2004 at 11:42 pm · Filed under General
For about 1 year, I didn’t have a cell phone. I switched jobs a while back, and no longer needed a phone. It was a nice break to not have to worry about this extra device and the coverage inside of my house was very poor (as in NO SERVICE).
Just recently, though, I felt like things were changing. Cellular plans have come down in price, the phones have gotten better and ATT Wireless was rolling out a new GSM 800 network. So I did a little research and I purchased a Sony-Ericsson T637 through AT&T wireless in Mountain View. I will post about that experience in a a few days.
Anyways, this phone was so much better than any other phone I had ever had. The industrial design was nice, it was color, it had a camera, it was small, it’s battery life was excellent, it had a little joystick, it had q-bert, it had internet access via GPRS, and it had bluetooth. All of the features worked as advertised. I even had a ringtone of that old Styx song ‘Mr. Roboto’ on there to successfully annoy my co-workers.
What about voice? Well, yes, that worked great. This phone used ATT Wireless’s new GSM 800 network at 850 mhz as well as the GSM 1800 and GSM 1900 frequencies. That made all the difference in the world. I had coverage in all parts of the house and I didn’t drop calls. Very nice. All other GSM phones did extremely poorly in my house. Don’t even think about data like GPRS or EDGE without GSM 800!
Unfortunately, as you can tell by the tense of that previous run-on sentences, I did not keep the phone. I found it to be a bit underpowered for what I wanted in a handheld communicator. The phone only had about 2 megs of storage, and it’s Java apps were slow. I would also notice that the camera would image about 5 frames after I clicked the ’shutter’. The showstopper was that the phone’s APIs and platform were way too underpowered for me. So, I returned this great phone and got a greater one.
Now note, I did like the phone and I would recommend it to others… but I needed more out of a phone. The new phone? Well, that is a topic for another blog post 
August 31, 2004 at 10:39 pm · Filed under General
I woke up this morning to hear about the new iMac during the business segment of NPR. When I got to work I surfed over to Apple to check it out. Overall, I think it is a really nice computer. I think they will have a nice 5-8 year run on this design. The price is too high, of course. However, if I had to buy a Mac these days, I know I would get an iMac over any other (even an eMac).
Now, its the secondary effect that will also be interesting. Apple has now set the new standard for the consumer personal computer with this design. I expect the larger PC manufacturers (Dell, Sony, HP, etc.) to start getting those iMac clones out in about a year from now. All of these companies had designs or terrible attempts in the past, but the technology is just about right now. My bet is that Sony will probably be the first to figure out a design. They have all the pieces required. It won’t be until Dell releases their ScreenPC that they really take off.
August 31, 2004 at 10:26 pm · Filed under General
I’m sitting here with two monitors.
I’m checking my email over the web.
I’m watching/listening to the Apple keynote in another window.
I’m paying somebody for an eBay purchase.
My phone is talking to my computer wirelessly.
My computers are talking to the internet over WiFi.
and more and more and more…
And yes, I’m in my underwear.
It is here, it is here, it is here…. it is all finally here.. and it is
going to get even better!
August 31, 2004 at 4:48 pm · Filed under General
I don’t have a friendster account (or an Orkut one for that matter.) I do use Plaxo and LinkedIn (yeah, I work for Plaxo on the Outlook client 
)
Then I read this blog about what happens to someone if they talk about work on their blog. They get fired. Very lame. I thought it was refreshing to hear that they are using PHP. Another note, I used to work for Jeff Winner back at eGroups, so I find that odd. Why didn’t he stick up for her?
Anyhow, the bottom line is this. I will never get a friendster account and I will urge you to do the same.
August 23, 2004 at 9:54 pm · Filed under General
I was browsing around the old internet today and happened on an ad for the following company:
http://www.artvps.com/
They make PCI boards that will take your render times down several orders in magnitude. Their stuff works with Maya, MentalRay, and a few of the other big ones.
I think stuff like this is really neat. I wonder what technology they use to achieve the acceleration?
August 16, 2004 at 2:24 pm · Filed under General
This company called ClearCube just got $25 million in funding.
That is nice, but it is the technology that is neat. They have some sort of little box that acts as a thin client for your PC. Essentially, you put the CPU and storage on these blades in a rack, and you use ethernet and fiber to talk to these thin clients on the desktop. Tada, no more noisy, bulky PC.
This has been an interest of mine for quite a long time. Back in 1990, when I was working at University of Miami, I worked for a guy who was really into this. He had our monitors and our keyboards extended out to our desks, and our MicroVAX workstations in the computer room. This was easily about 30′ of cable. I had a mono monitor with keyboard and mouse and he had a nice color monitor. It worked really well. The trick was to get the right COAX for the video.
Come to think of it, the idea probably wasn’t so strange for him. He was used to terminals prior to that. You always had the monster computer in one room and the termnials spread out every where else. This was just a small extension of that concept.
Today, however, the PC design is still the same as 20+ years ago. You have a detached keyboard, mouse, and monitor. Then you have your big box. If you wanted to extend it, you would run into problems because they don’t make video and USB systems that can extend that far.
I’ve tried the PC Anywhere, VNC, etc. solutions. Those work ‘OK’, but they pale in comparison to normal PC usage.
The only hope is the new DVI standard. Eventually, someone will figure out how to convert that inexpensively to optical, which will allow it to move over fiber. Then you can just run an 8 strand plastic fiber to your computer and have your PC sitting in a closet somewhere. Maybe you can use it to heat your water :-).
This may happen sooner than you think with the convergence of PC’s with consumer electronics. People will want their noisy PC’s to be far from their HD screen.
August 14, 2004 at 1:01 pm · Filed under General
The 16 pipelines have 16bit or 32bit formats for the texture pipelines.
Also, the system uses 64 bit filtering for the system.
Even better, on the tech specs, they specify:
Full 128-bit studio-quality, floating point precision through the entire rendering pipeline with native hardware support for 32bpp, 64bpp, and 128bpp rendering modes
Amazing!
Check out the page on the filtering effects.
Incredible!
August 12, 2004 at 11:19 am · Filed under General
I’ve been meaning to post about this for a while. If you didn’t notice, Nvidia released their new GPUs a couple months back.
Whats new?
Well, they are 16 pipes of 32 bit goodness. How many transistors?
222 MILLION
Compare that to a P4, the latest and greatest from Intel. Most of the P4’s were 40-55 million transistors. The latest Prescott core has 125 millon on strained silicon an 90 nm.
This means that such a GPU is really a VERY INTERESTING processor. Imagine how many calculations all those floating point units can perform. Phenomenal.
The new demos coming out are extremely impressive as well! What eye candy.
I expect even more interesting architectures to come out over the next 10 years in the GPU space. Just for graphics alone, more needs to happen. Imagine collision detection or a modern non-immediate mode scene graph system all in the GPU.
You can now get these floating point monsters for about $200 and up. Nvidia just released the 6600 chips today.
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