Data Cube Systems

Microsoft Windows XP was released on Thursday, October 25, 2001. Eight years later, on Thursday, October 22, 2009 - Microsoft will release Windows 7 to the world in all the available versions.

Microsoft’s own partners are gearing up their line-ups for the release of Windows 7, and this will be the probably the last day when ATI and nVidia can launch their DirectX 11-powered graphics chips into e-tail and retail. Who is late for this train, doesn’t have a good writing on the wall. However, the release date on October 22 doesn’t mean that enthusiasts and power users won’t have at least a month of experience playing with the new operating system.

If we take a look at Microsoft pages in the book, the company usually releases an RTM version [Release-To-Manufacturing] anywhere between 45 and 60 days before to retail release, meaning we could be playing with the finished version of Windows 7 as early as August. This is nothing unexpected, just the natural course of action which will spice up the late summer. Back in 2001, I received the Windows XP Professional RTM CD for my birthday [August 30, 1979 for those interested] - it was standard white label CD with printed black-and-white cover, packed in a classic OEM CD slip with Microsoft-like CD key label.

Long story short, we can expect RTM hitting us anywhere between weeks beginning on August 24, ending with the week starting on September 7.

At the time of writing, we have no confirmation about the pricing of Windows 7, but we can say with a “certain dose of certainty” that Microsoft won’t do jack for users who paid massive 400 greenbacks for purchasing their copies of Windows Vista Ultimate. Given that Microsoft fall flat on their faces with the alleged future features of Vista Ultimate, we cannot recommend even considering Windows 7 Ultimate unless all the “future features” are implemented from day one. Windows 7 is make-or-break operating system release for Microsoft, since any uncertainty or flaw will be an automatic door opening for Android, Mac OSX Snow Leopard and the like.

Grab a bag of popcorn, kick up your feet and enjoy the show — this one’s just getting good. After Intel filed a lawsuit against NVIDIA late last month alleging that a four-year-old chipset license agreement the companies signed did not extend to Intel’s future generation CPUs with ‘integrated’ memory controllers (like Nehalem), NVIDIA has hit back. Hard.

Today, NVIDIA has bucked back by filing a countersuit in the Court of Chancery in the State of Delaware against Intel Corporation for breach of contract. Furthermore, the action also seeks to terminate Intel’s license to NVIDIA’s valuable patent portfolio, which no doubt is reverberating with some level of intensity in the halls of Intel. According to NVIDIA, the countersuit was “brought in response to a filing by Intel last month in the Delaware court,” which is no doubt the little skirmish we referenced earlier.

Jen-Hsun Huang, president and CEO of NVIDIA — who has never shied away from speaking his mind with no filter in place — had this to say: “NVIDIA did not initiate this legal dispute. But we must defend ourselves and the rights we negotiated for when we provided Intel access to our valuable patents. Intel’s actions are intended to block us from making use of the very license rights that they agreed to provide.”

There’s no telling how all of this will shake out — we’d like to think the two could just compromise, keep collaborating from afar and move on, but we get the feeling they wouldn’t have brought the lawyers in if that was even a remote possibility. Hey, guys, can we just make sure this public bickering doesn’t hinder innovation? Good.

A quarter-century ago, American rocket scientists proposed the “Star Wars” defense system to knock Soviet missiles from the skies with laser beams. Some of the same scientists are now aiming their lasers at another airborne threat: the mosquito.

In a lab in this Seattle suburb, researchers in long white coats recently stood watching a small glass box of bugs. Every few seconds, a contraption 100 feet away shot a beam that hit the buzzing mosquitoes, one by one, with a spot of red light.

The insects survived this particular test, which used a non-lethal laser. But if these researchers have their way, the Cold War missile-defense strategy will be reborn as a WMD: Weapon of Mosquito Destruction.

“We’d be delighted if we destabilize the human-mosquito balance of power,” says Jordin Kare, an astrophysicist who once worked at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, the birthplace of some of the deadliest weapons known to man. More recently he worked on the mosquito laser, built from parts bought on eBay.

The scientists’ actual target is malaria, which is caused by a parasite transmitted when certain mosquitoes bite people. Ended in the U.S. decades ago, malaria remains a major global public-health threat, killing about 1 million people annually.

Efforts to eradicate the disease languished for years until recently.

Big-money donors like Bill Gates, the United Nations, the U.K. and non-profit such as Malaria No More re-launched the war on malaria, devoting billions of dollars to vaccines, methods of prevention and novel ways to kill mosquitoes.

“You can say we are very lucky — the right place at the right time,” says astrophysicist Szabolcs Márka, a Columbia University specialist in black holes. He has a grant to develop a “mosquito flashlight” designed to knock out the bugs’ eye-like sensors.

Scientists around the world are testing ways of thwarting mosquitoes with microwaves, rancid odors, poisoned blood and other weapons that disrupt the sense of sight, smell and heat mosquitoes use to find their prey.

There’s work on genetically altering a bacterium to infect and kill a mosquito, and a project to build a malaria-free mosquito genetically enhanced to overtake the natural kind.

There’s also a researcher in Japan who thinks mosquitoes can be a force for good. He is working on transforming them into “flying syringes” that deliver vaccines with every bite.

The mosquito laser is the brainchild of Lowell Wood, an astrophysicist who worked with Edward Teller, father of the hydrogen bomb and architect of the original plan to use lasers to shield America from the rain of Soviet nuclear arms.

President Ronald Reagan embraced the idea in the 1980s, dubbing it the Strategic Defense Initiative.

Senator Edward Kennedy mocked it as “Star Wars.” Eventually it became a footnote in history.

Its rebirth as a bug killer came thanks to Nathan Myhrvold, a former Microsoft Corp. executive who now runs Intellectual Ventures LLC., a company that collects patents and funds inventions. His old boss, Mr. Gates, had asked him to explore new ways of combating malaria. At a brainstorming session in 2007, Dr. Wood, the Star Wars architect, suggested using lasers on mosquitoes.

Soon Dr. Wood, Dr. Kare and another Star Wars scientist teamed with an entomologist with a Ph.D in mosquito behavior and other experts. They killed their first mosquito with a hand-held laser in early 2008.

“We like to think back then we made some contribution to the ending of the Cold War” with the Star Wars program, Dr. Kare says. “Now we’re just trying to make a dent in a war that’s actually gone on a lot longer and claimed a lot more lives.”

The scientists envision their technology might one day be used to draw a laser barrier around a house or village that could kill or blind the bugs. Or, laser-equipped drone aircraft could track bugs by radar, sweeping the sky with death-dealing photons.

They now face one big challenge: deciding how strong to make the weapon. The laser has to be weak enough to not harm humans and smart enough to avoid hitting useful bugs. “You could kill billions of mosquitoes a night, and you could do so without harming butterflies,” says Mr. Myhrvold.

Demonstrating the technology recently, Dr. Kare, Mr. Myhrvold and other researchers stood below a small shelf mounted on the wall about 10 feet off the ground. On the shelf were five Maglite flashlights, a zoom lens from a 35mm camera, and the laser itself — a little black box with an assortment of small lenses and mirrors. On the floor below sat a Dell personal computer that is the laser’s brain.

The glass box of mosquitoes across the room is an old 10-gallon fish tank. Each time a beam strikes a bug, the computer makes a gunshot sound to signal a direct hit.

To locate individual mosquitoes, light from the flashlights hits the tank across the room, creating tiny mosquito silhouettes on reflective material behind it. The zoom lens picks up the shadows and feeds the data to the computer, which controls the laser and fires it at the bug.

In a video, researchers showed what happens when they deploy deadly rays.

A mosquito hovers into view. Suddenly, it bursts into flame. A thin plume of smoke rises as the mosquito falls. At the bottom of the screen, the carcass smolders.

There’s ready supply of fresh recruits nearby, where an intern feeds a saucer of goat blood to a colony of anopheles stephensi, one species of mosquito that transmits malaria.

Not only can the laser target a mosquito, it can also tell a male from a female based on wing-beat.

That’s a crucial distinction, since only females feed on blood and thus transmit disease. Males in the wild eat sugary plant nectar. (In the lab they get raisins.)

“If you really were a purist, you could only kill the females, not the males,” Mr. Myhrvold says. But since they’re mosquitoes, he says, he’ll probably “just slay them all.”

Robots the size of riding lawn mowers could be used to start building a lunar outpost before humans make their next trip to the moon, according to a study by researchers at Astrobotic Technology Inc. and Carnegie Mellon University’s Robotics Institute.

The researchers will offer details about the NASA-sponsored study and their plans to create the robots during the NASA Lunar Surface Systems conference tomorrow in Washington.

“NASA faces a challenge in planning the layout for its outpost, which is expected to begin operations in 2020,” said William “Red” Whittaker, chairman and chief technical officer of Astrobotic and a Carnegie Mellon professor of robotics, in a statement. He added that NASA will have to figure out how to construct a landing site so that each rocket landing and takeoff won’t blast buildings and equipment with rocks and soil.

The new robots would be the latest of several that will be put to work on NASA moon missions. NASA has said that the future of space exploration will depend on humans and robots working hand-in-hand as manned and unmanned missions head to the moon, to Mars and farther into space.

Robots have already made their way into several space missions, but Carl Walz, director of advanced capabilities at NASA and a former astronaut, said in a previous interview that “we’re just starting to scratch the surface of these concepts. It’ll be absolutely critical. What we’re trying to do is figure out how best to incorporate human exploration and robots. I think the nature of exploration will be different [because of robots].”

Last year, a 7.5-foot long robotic arm on the Mars Lander scraped up ice and scooped up Martian soil for analysis. Matthew Robinson, robotic arm flight software engineer at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, said last summer that the robotic arm was the key piece of the whole Mars mission. The robotic arm and the Mars Lander froze to death last November in the lengthening Martian night.

The two Mars Rovers, Opportunity and Spirit, also have robotic parts that are helping them traverse the Martian landscape and send information back to Earth. And onboard the International Space Station, a $200 million, a 12-foot-tall robot was set up this past spring to handle maintenance jobs outside the facility, relieving astronauts of the need to make many dangerous space walks.

Allard Beutel, a spokesman for NASA, said in an earlier interview with Computerworld that such missions are the first steps in a robotic partnership that will help humans press further out into the solar system.

“The work we’re doing now — the robotics we’re doing — is what we’re going to need to do to build any workstation or habitat structure on the moon or Mars,” said Beutel. “Yes, this is just the beginning.”

The report being released tomorrow points to two ways that robots can help build a rocket landing and launching site.

In the first scenario, two robotic rovers weighing in at about 330 pounds each would build a berm around the landing/launch site to shield the rest of the outpost from flying debris. Building a 8.5-foot-tall berm that stretches into a 160-foot semicircle is expected to be a six-month job for the robots, according to researchers.

And in a second possibility, robots could be designed to sift through the lunar soil to gather rocks that could be used to build a solid landing site.

“To discern the best approach, early robotic scouting missions need to gather on-site information about the soil’s cohesion levels and whether rocks and gravel of the right size can be found at the site,” said Astrobotic CEO John Kohut, in a statement.

The technology, dubbed PCMOS (probabilistic complementary metal-oxide semiconductor) was invented by Professor Krishna Palem of Rice University and Director of NTU’s Institute for Sustainable Nanoelectronics (ISNE). The U.S.-Singapore team making the announcement is led by Professor Palem and NTU’s Associate Professor Yeo Kiat Seng, Head of Division of Circuits and Systems, School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering (EEE), College of Engineering.

The team’s goal is green computing. They are looking for applications where PCMOS can deliver as well as or better than existing technology but with a fraction of the energy required.

“Probabilistic design methodology, if used for consumer devices, would result in energy efficient devices,” says Professor Palem who conceived probabilistic design. “For example, for consumers, it could mean the difference between charging a cell phone every few weeks instead of every few days. In addition to the encryption application that we have demonstrated, among other applications, it is equally well-suited for computer graphics.”

Professor Palem explains that in streaming video application on a cell phone for example, it is unnecessary to conduct precise calculations. The small screen, combined with the human brain’s ability to process less-than-perfect pictures, results in a case where the picture looks just as good with a calculation that is only approximately correct.

Dr Natalie Kong Zhi Hui, Teaching Fellow, in NTU’s EEE and a member of team, says “Our technology is a significant contributor towards environmental-friendliness - green computing, or probabilistic computing, with an extremely energy-aware attribute. This is due to the fact that, unlike conventional designs that view noise as a nuisance, our design concept embraces noise as a “gem” - this novel technology recycles noise.”

The microchip is a successful proof-of-concept of the PCMOS technology which has demonstrated an improvement of 30 times in terms of energy consumption while running seven times faster than the contemporary CMOS design.

This is in contrast with today’s silicon transistors become increasingly ‘noisy’ as they get smaller, thus engineers have historically dealt with this by boosting the operating voltage to overpower the noise to ensure accurate calculations, leading to higher energy consumption levels.
 

“With this PCMOS technology, noise/parameter variations are part of the overall design and are managed as a resource to achieve significant energy savings. Our vision is to see a new generation of probabilistic-based nanoelectronics with diverse applications in media, biomedical, information technology (IT) and consumer electronics. The success of this project would go a long way in promoting the advent of a new generation of ‘green’ IT at lower costs to consumers,” says Professor Yeo.

Professor Yeo, Dr Kong, Professor Palem and his student, Dr Pinar Korkmaz, successfully ran the first real-world tests of the revolutionary prototype microchip. This is a culmination of various chip designs and testing that started in 2005.

According to Professor Yeo, PCMOS is also ideally suited for encryption, a process that relies on generating random numbers. Thus the microchip can be quickly incorporated in electronic devices such as in computer gaming, lotteries and cryptography (internet security) where random calculations are valuable. “This is in addition to applications where there is a need to produce statistical simulation, such as in financial and economic forecast so that more accurate predictions can be made,” says Professor Yeo.

Equally important is that the implementation of PCMOS piggybacks on the current “complementary metal-oxide semiconductor” technology, or CMOS, that chipmakers already use. This means that chipmakers can use existing equipment to support PCMOS, resulting in lower entry costs for the new technology.

The Rice-NTU team plans to follow its proof-of-concept work on encryption with proof-of-concept tests on microchips for cell phones, graphics cards and medical implants. They look forward to taking this concept of probabilistic design, which is one key focus of NTU’s ISNE, to the next level.

“In Singapore, the next level is to create a larger activity with roots at NTU and which spans an increasingly vigorous international network based at Rice. The vision for this will include next generation electronics, based on principles drawn from the mathematics of probability as it relates to areas such as risk analysis, perceptual neurobiology, nanoscale devices and computing with applications to exciting domains such as graphics and multimedia, education and global health,” says Professor Palem.

The team hopes PCMOS technology will enter the consumer computing market in as little as four years and may present itself as a parallel to mainstream CMOS technology in the near future.