may the force be with you

"Following up on the Swedish study on cell phone cancer risk, the FDA released a statement today questioning its reliability. From the statement: 'These facts along with the lack of an established mechanism of action and supporting animal data makes the Hardell et al's finding difficult to interpret.' Also available several links to other studies."

source:http://science.slashdot.org/science/06/04/07/1517249.shtml

"The FCC implemented a Report and Order on Reconsideration (R&O on Recon) that uses some of the same exemptions for junk faxes that currently exist for the Do Not Call list. The new rules specify that junk faxers can claim an Existing Business Relationship (EBR) to justify flooding you with junk faxes. Under the new rules, a junk faxer could visit your website and call that an existing business relationship. The new rules also prevent junk-fax trapping, in which someone posts their fax number on the internet, waits for junk faxes, then files suit against the faxers under the TCPA. With all of the government-sponsored selling out of The People that has been going on in the past, say, 6 or so years, one has to wonder when or even if it is going to stop."

source:http://yro.slashdot.org/yro/06/04/07/1436239.shtml

Sapphire Technologies is ATI's biggest add-in-board (AIB) partner, something which even ATI's CEO, David Orton has said. We often hear about the battles between ATI and NVIDIA but were able to get a massive inside edge by speaking to the CEO of Sapphire, Mr K D Au, in his first press interview for four years.

Sapphire CEO - K D Au

HEXUS: Hi, KD, thanks for taking the time to talk to us about life, the world, and everything.
KD: [smiles] A pleasure.

HEXUS:Let’s start at the present day, how is business?
KD: Well, it has been tough for the last year, with the supply levels being low, and it has been very difficult to meet the demands of customers. Our marketing guys have done well to drive the brand but without the supply of high-end parts it's hard to make sure that we can follow through with the goods.

HEXUS: How come it has been tough?
KD: We all know that ATI has struggled recently in certain parts of the market. But I believe changes at ATI will make things better. ATI put a lot of work into development for the XBox 360. This may have been a good project to undertake in the long-term, but it has hurt it in other areas, due to the fact they've had to redistribute resources.

HEXUS: It is public knowledge about your relationship with KY (ex-CEO of ATI), how has the relationship with ATI changed now he has left the company?
KD: To be fair, nothing has changed in the past two or three years with our relationship - KY had taken a strong back seat and Orton seems to have made some great changes and made the company focused for the better.

HEXUS:Who do you think is ahead? NVIDIA or ATI?
KD: They are leading in different areas, ATI, of course, was first to invest in the set-top box (DTP) but, of course, performance-wise it moves between both parties.

HEXUS: Let’s take a moment to talk about Sapphire: what are the success stories?
KD: Well, we are aiming to focus on selling a brand, we want to have multiple products and make sure that the relationships and channels we have set up get used in different product SKUs.

HEXUS: But you are ATI's biggest AIB partner, how will you grow or even retain this massive market share?
KD: We are not concerned about the AIB market, we have good products and a strong brand and we have great relationships with customers, distributors and press. However,we can't rely on ATI alone to grow the company in the long run - we need to be selective about what SKUs and products we take on and make sure that we target them to the right audiences.

HEXUS: What about the world market, which regions are you strong in?
KD: We are very strong in North America, Canada, UK, Germany and the Nordics but we are weak in other areas, such as Asia, and this is a great area to target for growth. We are also weak in Turkey and that’s another market I want to make sure we go with.

HEXUS:What’s your biggest weaknesses as a company?
KD: Single-source suppliers; it is bad for any business to be dependant on a single supplier. Take our business, our primary business is producing and selling discrete graphics boards based on ATI GPUs. If the market trends aren't in ATI's favour and NVIDIA is ahead then this, obviously, can hurt us. Also, if ATI can't deliver in volume this hurts us, too. The best thing which we can do is make sure we aren't dependant on a single supplier or SKU.

HEXUS: So you mean you might go "green"?
KD: I am not saying that directly but a lot of our customers, OEMs and retailers, have asked for both NVIDIA and ATI SKUs. Think of it like this, there are two types of people who will want a German car, some go for BMW, some go for Mercedes - the best thing to do is make sure both are covered. When the time is right, we may do it.

HEXUS: Oh, right, which OEMs do you currently work with?
KD: The bigger ones are Fujitsu Siemens, Medion and NEC. They will come to us and state they want XYZ and we have to deliver that or lose the business. Of course this is one of the main things which we have aimed to achieve with Sapphire, and that’s to build the brand rather than just being another "ATI" partner.

source:http://www.hexus.net/content/item.php?item=4393

ntroduction

Over a year ago at the Fall 2005 Intel Developer Forum, Intel formally announced that they would be dropping the Pentium 4's Netburst microarchitecture in favor of a brand new, more power-efficient microarchitecture that would carry the company's entire x86 product line, from laptops up through Xeon servers, into the next decade. Not since April of 2001, when Netburst arrived on the scene to replace the P6 microarchitecture that powered the Pentium Pro, Pentium II, and Pentium III, have all segments of Intel's x86 processor line used the same microarchitecture.

This past IDF saw the unveiling of some significant details about this new microarchitecture, which was formerly called "Merom" but now goes by the official name of "Core." (You'll also see Core called NGMA, an acronym for "next-generation microarchitecture.") Intel presented many of these details in a presentation on Core, and others were obtained by David Kanter of Real World Technologies. The present article draws on both of those sources, as well as my own correspondence with Intel, to paint what is (hopefully) an accessible picture of the new microarchitecture that will soon be powering everything from Windows Vista servers to Apple laptops.

A question of breeding?

Before I get into the more technical discussion of Core's features, I want to quickly spell out how I view Core's relationship to its predecessors. As Intel has repeatedly claimed, Core is a new microarchitecture that was designed from scratch with today's performance and power consumption needs in mind. Nonetheless, Core does draw heavily on its predecessors, taking the best of the Pentium 4 and the Pentium M (Banias) and rolling them into a design that looks much more like the latter than the former.

Because the Pentium M itself is a new design that draws heavily on the P6 microarchitecture, I've chosen to place Core very generally within the P6 "lineage." However, I ask the reader not to read too much into this loosely applied biological metaphor, because my comparing Core to its P6 predecessors and talking about its development in terms of the "evolution" of the "P6 lineage" is really nothing more than an way to organize the discussion for ease of comprehension.

Core, multicore, and the big picture

When Intel's team in Israel set about designing the processor architecture that would carry the company's entire x86 product line for the next five years or so, they had multicore computing in mind. But for Intel, having multicore in mind doesn't mean quite the same thing that it means for Sun or IBM. Specifically, it "multicore" doesn't mean "throw out out-of-order execution and scale back single-threaded performance in favor of a massively parallel architecture that can run a torrent of simultaneous threads." Such an aggressive, forward-looking approach is embodied in designs like STI's Cell and Sun's Ultrasparc T1. Instead, Intel's understanding of what it takes to make a "multicore" architecture is significantly more conservative, and very "Intel."

Intel's approach to multicore is not about keeping each individual core's on-die footprint down by throwing out dynamic execution hardware, but about keeping each core's power consumption down and its efficiency up. In this sense, Intel's strategy is fundamentally process-based, which is why I said it's "very 'Intel.'" Intel will rely not on the microarchitectural equivalent of a crash diet, but on Moore's Law to enable more cores to fit onto each die. It seems that from Intel's perspective, there's no need to start throwing hardware overboard in order to keep the core's size down, because core sizes will shrink as transistor sizes shrink.

This talk of shrinking core sizes brings me to my next point about Core: scalability. The Pentium 4's performance was designed to scale primarily with clockspeed increases. In contrast, Core's performance will scale primarily with increases in the number of cores per die (i.e. feature size shrinks) and with the addition of more cache, and secondarily with modest, periodic clockspeed increases. In this respect, Core is designed to take advantage of Moore's Law in a fundamentally different way than the Pentium 4.

source:http://arstechnica.com/articles/paedia/cpu/core.ars

"There are two major theories about the composition of the Sun. One says that it has similar composition to the planets. The other, that it has enriched levels of oxygen-16. NASA has been doing research on the soil samples Neil Armstrong brought back from the moon, to determine which of those theories is correct. Today, we have the results; they're both wrong. It looks like we're going to have to look more closely at the composition of everything in the solar system to figure this one out."

source:http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/04/06/2212210

Scientists have made one of the most important fossil finds in history: a missing link between fish and land animals, showing how creatures first walked out of the water and on to dry land more than 375m years ago.

Palaeontologists have said that the find, a crocodile-like animal called the Tiktaalik roseae and described today in the journal Nature, could become an icon of evolution in action - like Archaeopteryx, the famous fossil that bridged the gap between reptiles and birds.

As such, it will be a blow to proponents of intelligent design, who claim that the many gaps in the fossil record show evidence of some higher power.

Richard Dawkins, the evolutionary biologist, said: "Our emergence on to the land is one of the more significant rites of passage in our evolutionary history, and Tiktaalik is an important link in the story."

Tiktaalik - the name means "a large, shallow-water fish" in the Inuit language Inuktikuk - shows that the evolution of animals from living in water to living on land happened gradually, with fish first living in shallow water.

The animal lived in the Devonian era lasting from 417m to 354m years ago, and had a skull, neck, and ribs similar to early limbed animals (known as tetrapods), as well as a more primitive jaw, fins, and scales akin to fish.

The scientists who discovered it say the animal was a predator with sharp teeth, a crocodile-like head, and a body that grew up to 2.75 metres (9ft) long.

"It's very important for a number of reasons, one of which is simply the fact that it's so well-preserved and complete," said Jennifer Clack, a paleontologist at Cambridge University and author of an accompanying article in Nature.

Scientists have previously been able to trace the transition of fish into limbed animals only crudely over the millions of years they anticipate the process took place. They suspected that an animal which bridged the gap between fish and land-based tetrapods must have existed - but, until now, there had been scant evidence of one.

"Tiktaalik blurs the boundary between fish and land-living animal both in terms of its anatomy and its way of life," said Neil Shubin, a biologist at the University of Chicago, and a leader of the expedition which found Tiktaalik.

The near-pristine fossil was found on Ellesmere Island, Canada, which is 600 miles from the north pole in the Arctic Circle.

Scientists from the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia, the University of Chicago, and Harvard University led several expeditions into the inhospitable icy desert to search for the fossils.

The find is the first complete evidence of an animal that was on the verge of the transition from water to land. "The find is a dream come true," said Ted Daeschler of the Academy of Natural Sciences.

"We knew that the rocks on Ellesmere Island offered a glimpse into the right time period and were formed in the right kinds of environments to provide the potential for finding fossils documenting this important evolutionary transition."

When Tiktaalik lived, the Canadian Arctic region was part of a land mass which straddled the equator. Like the Amazon basin today, it had a subtropical climate and the animal lived in small streams. The skeleton indicates that it could support its body under the force of gravity.

Farish Jenkins, an evolutionary biologist at Harvard University said: "This represents a critical early phase in the evolution of all limbed animals, including humans - albeit a very ancient step." Tiktaalik also gives biologists a new understanding of how fins turned into limbs. Its fin contains bones that compare to the upper arm, forearm and primitive parts of the hand of land-living animals.

"Most of the major joints of the fin are functional in this fish," Professor Shubin said.

"The shoulder, elbow and even parts of the wrist are already there and working in ways similar to the earliest land-living animals."

Dr Clack said that, judging from the fossil, the first evolutionary transition from sea to land probably involved learning how to breathe air. "Tiktaalik has lost a series of bones that, in fishes, covers the gill region and helps to operate the gill-breathing mechanism," she said. "The air-breathing mechanism it had would have been elaborated and having lost the series of bones that lies between the head and the shoulder girdle means it's got a neck, it can raise its head more easily in order to gulp the air.

"The flexible robust limbs appear to be connected with pushing the head out of the water to breathe the air."

H Richard Lane, director of sedimentary geology and palaeobiology at the US National Science Foundation, said: "These exciting discoveries are providing fossil Rosetta stones for a deeper understanding of this evolutionary milestone - fish to land-roaming tetrapods."

A cast of the fossil goes on display at the Science Museum in South Kensington central London today.

source:http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/story/0,,1747926,00.html