The weekly newsletter for Fed2 by ibgames

EARTHDATE: November 19, 2006

Official News - page 12

WINDING DOWN

An idiosyncratic look at, and comment on, the week's net and technology news
by Alan Lenton

I sometime get asked how I pick out what to write about in Winding Down. One reader commented that it often seems that I use a 'random subject generator'. Well... Not exactly. I really have three criteria. One, it should be something I'm interested in, or two, it should be something I feel is important (even if I find it boring) that hasn't been covered properly in the mainstream technical press. The third criteria is negative - I avoid issues, even if they are important, that have been beaten to death by mainstream coverage!

I also try to cover some material in a little more depth, explaining the technical issues, when possible - this week's piece on Sony's PS3 and blue laser production problems is an example of this sort of piece.

Because I'm a sociologist by training, much of the material I cover hovers on the tech/society border - some of it even strays into the realm of (...gasps of horror...) politics. That's because politicians are notoriously a-technical, and regularly pass legislation, the consequences of which have not been thought out. I have no compunction about pointing out this sort of stupidity - in the case of both my own crassly incompetent government, and that of anyone else's country that comes under the microscope. Usually, though, I tend to be more lenient with other people's governments, since they are the responsibility of their own citizens.

So, with that in mind, here are this week's 'random' choices :)


Story: Sony, we have lift off; the PS3 hits the online market

Well the PS3 launched - in limited quantities - in the US this last week. There were queues snaking round the block at the major outlets for anything up to 48 hours prior to the release. It was an interesting enough phenomena that C|Net sent a reporter down to talk to all these hard core gamers that are so desperate to get their hands on the most expensive of the three next generation consoles.

Ooops! The early birds turn out not to be hard core gamers at all, more like hard core entrepreneurs out to buy up PS3s and sell them on e-bay for a nice fat profit. And I thought the purpose of the web and sites like e-bay was to cut out the middleman!

One of the first non-e-bay destined machines was bought by market research firm iSuppli Corp, who proceeded to dismantle it and figure out just how much it cost to build. Their conclusion - Sony is taking a loss of more than US$240 on each unit it sells. That's a whole pile of cash - a quarter of a billion dollars loss for every million units sold. (By the way, the ibgames department of mindless measurements tells me that a quarter of a million one dollar bills laid end-to-end would just about go once round the Earth - so now you know!) Sony expects/hopes to sell six million of these units by next April, that's six times round the world.

These sort of losses are in the future, though, and what the teardown from the trendily named iSuppli revealed was that the PS3 is a very, very powerful machine. Indeed, the IBM cell broadband engine that functions as its CPU pushes its performance very close to supercomputer levels. Given that the graphics processing is offloaded into two very powerful chips from Nvidia and Toshiba, and the memory is extremely fast, I expect to see real racing performance from this 'console'.

Question: So why is Sony limiting the number of units available at each launch (400,00 in the US, 100,000 in Japan)? Especially given that the other consoles are available in greater numbers and demand for the PS3 substantially exceeds supply?

Answer: Difficulties in producing blue laser diodes on an industrial scale.

PS3s ship with a built in Blu-ray optical disk drive. These drives use a blue-violet laser (hence the name) to pack data closer together and obtain a very respectable 50GB of storage space.

The problem is that although in electronics fabrication terms it isn't that difficult to make the blue laser diodes, it is difficult to scale the process up to industrial levels where the yield from a batch matters. With semi-conductor manufacture there are always some flaws and defects on a wafer. The defective chips are discarded when the wafer is cut into individual chips.

The percentage of good chips on the wafer is a measure of the yield. Given that the number of chips on the wafer and the price of producing the wafer are fixed, the smaller the yield, the less chips there are to spread the cost over, so the more expensive it makes each good chip, as well as causing problems with the production capacity (the number of chips you actually have available to ship out). Sony claims to have overcome these problems, but the shortage of PS3s at the launch suggests they are being more than a little optimistic.

In the meantime, I'm going to have to wait until early next year to have the opportunity to buy a PS3 here in Europe, which is when it is slated for release :(

Do I want one? Hell, yes!!!

It looks like a really neat machine - and it's got a cut down Linux built in, and Terra Soft Solutions have worked with Sony to produce a port of their Yellow Dog Linux distribution for the PS3. It may not be on my Xmas wish list, but a top of the line PS3 and a copy of Yellow Dog Linux are definitely high on my list for my next birthday!

http://newsletter.eetimes.com/cgi-bin4/DM/y/e1su0FypUC0FrK0EtR60ER
http://www.physorg.com/news82829179.html
http://newsletter.eetimes.com/cgi-bin4/DM/y/e1su0FypUC0FrK0EtR70ES
http://www.terrasoftsolutions.com/products/ydl/
http://newsletter.eetimes.com/cgi-bin4/DM/y/e1us0FypUC0FrK0EtXe0EK
http://www.blu-ray.com/info/


Shorts:

Something very interesting happened on the music copying front here in the UK this month. The British Phonographic Industry (BPI) - the trade association for U.K. record companies - called for a change in the British law to allow people to legally copy tracks onto MP3 players for their own use.

Here in the UK, -any- copying of music that's in copyright is illegal, which, of course, means that millions of people who have copied music onto their MP3 players are criminals... The BPI, which actually polices this sort of thing on behalf of the music industry, has already announced that it will not prosecute people copying to MP3 players. It is also, it appears, is considering a move to put personal copy to MP3 authorisation directly onto CD packaging.

This is a welcome outbreak of common sense on the part of the music industry. Let's hope it isn't just an one off aberration.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/11/10/bpi_to_legalise_cd_copying/

One of the more dubious aspects of Microsoft's new Internet Explorer (IE7), is its decision to add functionality to colour the browser address bar green for 'trusted' web sites. Those are web sites that have been certified under the draft guidelines of the CA Browser Forum issued last month.

There are two major problems.

First, the guidelines are draft for a good reason - there is still a lot of work to be done on them, and currently only companies will be able to get their sites certified, discriminating against small businesses and individuals.

Second, the certification process is likely to be expensive - very expensive - if it is to be meaningful, which will also discriminate against small businesses and individuals running on tight margins.

I wonder how enthusiastic Microsoft would be about this plan if certification was to be funded by the browser maker paying a small royalty every time a 'green bar' site is visited? Or how many users would leave it switched on if they had to pay a royalty fee each time they used a site with the facility?

http://ct.techrepublic.com.com/clicks?t=18294943-18a32f6148453f76b7d88f6b914d69a0-bf&s=5&fs=0

This month has seem the supercomputer fraternity meeting in Tampa, Florida, for their annual shindig - this year called SC06 (no surprise there). I've been following the proceedings for an number of years now, it's usually quite interesting, but suffers from what I call 'Linux on the desktop syndrome'. In the same way that every year this century it has been announced that the next year will be the year in which Linux comes to the desktop, SC06 is full of announcements that next year is the year in which we will finally see supercomputers under the desktop!

Maybe the two sides should get together, and we could have the year of Linux desktop on the under the desk supercomputer :)

In the meantime, if you want to get a flavour of the sort of stuff on offer at the show take a look at the URL at the end of this piece, which is about the Tyan Typhoon system, which comes in a 21 x 14 x 28 inch case you wheel under your desk. You can get something like 256 gigaflops (wonderful name for a measurement, that) out of the 40 Intel cores on a fully loaded box - wow, it's almost powerful enough to run Microsoft Vista!

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/11/13/tyan_pcs_typhoon/

Some time ago I covered, at considerable, perhaps even interminable, length, Microsoft's problems with the European Commission (EC) caused by a lack of interoperability of its product in the EU. It kinda dropped off the radar until this week when it turned out Microsoft have only delivered 90% of the information they were supposed to deliver in July 2004 (followers of the delays in delivering new Microsoft operating systems will not be surprised at this).

Unsurprisingly, the EC is not happy. Bureaucrats deal in real dates, not marketing promises. Competition Commissioner Neelie Kroes said on Tuesday, 'I don't have eternal life.' Indeed.

A statement from the EC laid it firmly on the line: '...The commission expects the remaining omissions and deficiencies in the technical documentation to be remedied by 23 November...'

Fade out to the sound of Dion Warwick singing "Wishin' and Hopin'"...

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/11/15/kroes_talks_compliance/

Sun Microsystems, makers of fine computers in snazzy boxes with ludicrous price tags, and owners of the Java programming language, this week announced that Java was in future going to be licensed under the GNU's GPL license. This is something of a break for Sun who have build up a reputation for keeping the language tightly under its own control.

Java was originally touted as a lean sleek language, unlike the lumbering dinosaur of C++, which was doomed to fade away from its sheer complexity (cue doom laden music). This theory worked fine as long as Java could avoid contact with the real world. Unfortunately for Java, the real world is messy and dealing with the messiness required Java to bolt on bits of stuff from C++. Now Java is nearly as big and arguably even more complex than C++, which, incidentally, is still around. Oh, and by the way, I notice that Microsoft's C# is starting to follow the same trajectory as Java!

What the ailing Sun hopes to achieve by this move is unclear. The experience of Netscape in putting its Mozilla browser into open source shows that open sourcing a product is not a panacea for all ills, although to be fair, Java is in far better nick than Mozilla ever was under Netscape. Still at least it means that Java will probably survive should Sun go to the wall...

http://newsletter.infoworld.com/t?r=314&c=693668&l=3982&ctl=14E1057:
215D3E184FC552DC1FF67E19FB81662BEFF29049075316B4

http://newsletter.infoworld.com/t?r=314&c=693668&l=3982&ctl=14E1056:
215D3E184FC552DC1FF67E19FB81662BEFF29049075316B4

Meanwhile, Sun's arch-rival, Microsoft, was suffering just a leetle bit of em-barr-ass-ment. It seems that the new Microsoft digital music player - Zune - is not compatible with the new Microsoft Windows operating system, Vista! Oops :)

An ashen faced, tight lipped Microsoft spokesdroid refused to confirm whether there would be a patch issued to fix the problem. (Actually I made that up, but they really haven't said what they are going to do about it.) Vista went out to the OEMs a week or two ago (see last week's Winding Down), so they are going to have to do something soon. My take on this? If you were thinking of en-Zune-ing yourself, I'd wait till they sort it all out.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/11/16/zune_vista_incompatible/


Scanner: Other stories

CSIRO wins landmark wireless broadband legal battle
http://www.theage.com.au/news/wireless--broadband/csiro-wins-landmark-legal-battle/
2006/11/15/1163266614119.html

Wireless energy could power consumer and industrial electronics
http://www.physorg.com/news82754873.html

Zombie computer networks
http://news.com.com/Zombies+try+to+blend+in+with+the+crowd/2100-7349_3-6127304.html

Mini video player - dork gadget of the year
http://blog.scifi.com/tech/archives/2006/11/10/stop_the_madnes.html

FFII face-to-face to solve patent problems
http://www.regdeveloper.co.uk/2006/11/16/patent_conference/


Acknowledgements

Thanks to readers Barbara and Fi for drawing my attention to material used in this issue. Please send suggestions for material to alan@ibgames.com.

Alan Lenton
alan@ibgames.com
19 November 2006

Alan Lenton is an on-line games designer, programmer and sociologist. His web site is at http://www.ibgames.net/alan.

Past issues of Winding Down can be found at http://www.ibgames.net/alan/winding/index.html.


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