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Unconfirmed report:

Up to now, all PowerPC 970 processors manufactured have been prototypes, made for testing purposes. The 970 is now considered completely bug-free and ready for production. Yesterday, Peter Sandon - father of the 970 - gave the green light.

As of April 15, the 970 will be manufactured in quantity in IBM factories. Starting the end of June, the chips will be integrated in IBM Blade servers and in Apple systems.
This will be Apple's new high end chip. You don't know how much effort I've had to expend to restrain myself from posting any 970 related info before this bit. It's almost a year now that I've been watching this story. Now it finally seems like it is near. And not a moment too soon. It's do or die time at 1 Infinite Loop (that's Apple headquarters street address. I swear.)
- jim 4-09-2003 8:07 pm [link] [add a comment]

More 1 megapixel + digital camera phones coming (in Japan.) This is my latest fetish. I cannot wait for these to hit here in the U.S.

Here's what I'd do about the bandwidth problem. First, the phone has to have a lot of memory. At least a gigabyte. And no SD or memorystick please. Either give us a real hard drive (a la the iPod) or a CF type II slot (for a microdrive, or a just a big CF card.)

Store the pictures locally at highest resolution. At the same time, scale down a copy to a user preset pixel size / resolution (I'd set my camera to scale pictures down to 500 pixels wide at around 70% jpeg quality) and send the reduced photo wireless to either a user specified server, or to a teleco server. Use open standards for these transactions (FTP I guess. Or Webdav?) Possibly have a second size/resolution preset at an even greater reduction for use when sending to someone else's phone.

The phone should also have bluetooth so that the full resolution pictures will be synced with your main computer whenever you are within range (which could be almost all the time if you have a laptop.)
- jim 4-09-2003 6:26 pm [link] [add a comment]

With your help, Dan Gilmore is writing a book.

Dear Readers:

I'm working on a book, and invite you to be part of it.

The book will explore the intersection of technology and journalism. The working title is "Making the News" -- reflecting a central point of this project, namely that today's (and tomorrow's) communications tools are turning traditional notions of news and journalism in new directions. These tools give us the ability to take advantage, in the best sense of the word, of the fact that our collective knowledge and wisdom greatly exceeds any one person's grasp of almost any subject. We can, and must, use that reality to our mutual advantage.

I'm doing the typical research: reading, interviewing, thinking, organizing, etc. I think I know a lot already about this subject. Naturally, I also am aware that I could know a lot more. So let's practice what I preach.

To that end, I hope you will become a part of this book, too. You can start by reading the outline below. My publisher, O'Reilly & Associates, agreed that this was a good idea.
This is one of those ideas that sounds cool, but in the wrong hands could turn into something more like a marketing gimmick than a valid strategy for book writing. But I think Dan is the man for this job, and I'm very curious to see what comes of this close to my heart topic.
- jim 4-09-2003 6:16 pm [link] [add a comment]

The Phaistos Disk. "It's beautiful, it's a mystery, and it's very old; what's not to like?"
- jim 4-08-2003 10:38 pm [link] [1 comment]

Long super geeky backgrounder on implementing VisiCalc, the program that fueled the personal computer revolution.
- jim 4-08-2003 9:10 pm [link] [add a comment]

The strange story of a guy, an accordian, a weblog, and a girl who wasn't who she said she was. Not sure what the moral of this story is. Sort of unsettling on many fronts. And he doesn't even consider the weirdest possibility: maybe she really did prove P = NP, and now the world will never know.
- jim 4-08-2003 8:34 pm [link] [1 comment]

This came up in his blog, but it seemed to me at the time like things had been worked out, and it wasn't that big of a deal. Now wired has an article about the agonist plagiarizing many of his battle updates from a pay newsletter put out by Stratfor. Wired says:

Some of the information was attributed to news outlets and other sources, but much of it was unsourced, particularly the almost real-time combat information presumably gleaned from a string of high-level sources worldwide....

The only problem: Much of his material was plagiarized -- lifted word-for-word from a paid news service put out by Austin, Texas, commercial intelligence company Stratfor.
I never had the sense that he had a "string of high-level sources worldwide" but I guess that doesn't absolve him. Still, I think he provided a valuable (if slightly illegal) service. He distilled the news at a time when this was very difficult to do. Obviously he couldn't source the Stratfor stuff, because it was a paid service.

I guess you could object that he shouldn't have used the Stratfor stuff at all. Fair enough. I'm just saying that a lot of people wanted to know what was going on, and he provided that information. I put his wrong doing in the same camp as running a gnutella client. In other words: wrong, but it's not going to stop me from using such a fine service.
- jim 4-08-2003 8:27 pm [link] [4 comments]

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