Category: Computers

Check this about Sharp Labs from EE Times:

Camas, Wash. – Sharp Laboratories of America aims to turn your TV into a Web-surfing, news-gathering, sports-summarizing, on-demand movie viewing, e-mail center. As the beachhead for U.S. imports from Japan’s $20 billion Sharp Corp., Sharp Labs also has designs on your cell phone, video recorder, document-imaging system and more.

“We are charged primarily with researching technologies that Sharp Corp. can develop into products for the U.S. market,” said Sharp Labs’ founder and director, Jon Clemens. “For instance, Sharp had the first camera-enabled mobile phone, and by 2005 we will be producing only LCTVs [liquid-crystal-display televisions], no more CRTs.”

Interesting place, if I say so myself.

Despite a housing bubble, UCLA economists expect California to grow in 2005:

Yet the fallout from the bubble in California won’t be devastating, according to the UCLA Anderson Forecast. Indeed, the Golden State’s economy will expand at a faster clip than the nation’s in 2005, thanks in part to a recovering Bay Area, the widely watched forecast says.

All in all, next year is shaping up as “solid but not spectacular” for California, said Christopher Thornberg, a UCLA Anderson Forecast senior economist and author of its state outlook.

Welcome back.

So it’s official, IBM is getting out of the PC business:

SAN FRANCISCO (CBS.MW) — Lenovo Group Ltd. will buy IBM’s personal computing business in a $1.75 billion deal, creating what the companies said Tuesday night will be the No. 3 PC maker worldwide.

I thought this day would never come. The IBM PC, from its inception in 1981, had the most dramatic effect on the computer industry in general and my career in particular of any technology or event of the last 30 years. Before the PC, I was a system programmer at Texas Instruments developing operating systems and protocols for closed, proprietary systems, systems that were full of fun and complexity with multi-tasking, real-time priorities, virtual memory, and interprocess communications. The PC, with its deficient operating system and marginal hardware, put an end to that sort of system, bringing about a massive shift to bare-metal programming, a retarded CPU architecture, a return to proprietary communication protocols, and assembly language instead of block-structured high-level languages.

As the virus spread, it gradually overcame its origins and evolved into a lower-cost version of the kind of systems I used to work on, only without my having access to the system code so I could simply change it if I didn’t like the way it worked until Linux came along.

But now IBM has decided the whole experiment wasn’t such a hot idea. Presumably, they’re still in the server business as well as services and consulting, so the more things change the more they remain the same. Sorta.

Both nicotine and caffeine enhance memory, which accounts in part for their popularity. New drugs are even better at this, and without the addictive potential. Here’s part of a premium content article from The Economist on one of them:

Last year, Nancy Jo Wesensten, a research psychologist at the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research in Silver Spring, Maryland, compared the effects of three popular alertness drugs?modafinil, dextroamphetamine and caffeine?head to head, using equally potent doses. Forty-eight subjects received one of the drugs, or a placebo, after being awake for 65 hours. The researchers then administered a battery of tests. All of the drugs did a good job restoring wakefulness for six to eight hours. After that, says Dr Wesensten, the performance of the subjects on caffeine declined because of its short half-life (a fact that could be easily remedied by consuming another dose, she points out). The other two groups reached their operational limit after 20 hours?staying awake for a total of 85 hours.

When the researchers looked at the drugs’ effects on higher cognitive functions, such as planning and decision-making, they found each drug showed strengths and weaknesses in different areas. Caffeine was particularly effective in boosting a person’s ability to estimate unknown quantities. When asked 20 questions that required a specific numeric answer?such as ?how high off a trampoline can a person jump???92% of volunteers on caffeine and 75% on modafinil showed good estimation skills. But only 42% on dextroamphetamine did so?the same proportion as the sleep-deprived subjects who had received a placebo.

The Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the research arm of America’s defence department, is funding an initiative to find new and better ways to sustain performance during sleep deprivation. Among its collaborators are Yaakov Stern, a neuroscientist, and Sarah Lisanby, a psychiatrist, both of Columbia University. Using functional magnetic-resonance imaging, Dr Stern has been observing the brains of healthy volunteers before and after forgoing sleep.

In the process, he has discovered a neural circuit that is linked to prolonged periods of wakefulness while performing memory tasks. Interestingly, its areas of activation vary from person to person, depending on the ability to tolerate sleep deprivation. Dr Lisanby is an expert in transcranial magnetic stimulation, the use of strong magnetic fields to facilitate or impede the communication of nerve cells using a coil held close to the head. She now plans to test stimulating the very regions in the brain that appear to correspond to better cognitive performance during long hours of wakefulness.

DARPA is also supporting the research of Samuel Deadwyler, a neuroscientist at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, who is studying the effects of ampakines, so called because they bind to AMPA receptors. There, they amplify the actions of glutamate, a neurotransmitter involved in two-thirds of all brain communications. Roger Stoll, the boss of Cortex Pharmaceuticals, which has been developing the compounds, has called them ?a hearing aid for the brain?.

According to Dr Deadwyler’s tests in primates, Cortex’s new drug candidate, CX717, which just entered human clinical trials, appears to eliminate the cognitive deficits that go hand in hand with sleep loss. Monkeys deprived of sleep for 30 hours and then given an injection of the compound even do slightly better in short-term memory tests than well-rested monkeys without the drug. And unlike amphetamines, which put the whole body in a state of alert, CX717 only increases activity in key brain areas?without any addictive potential.

Interesting.

Benedict Arnold CEO’s who ship “American” jobs overseas aren’t hurting recent grads, according to a survey published by CNN Financial:

Those graduating with a degree in computer science are seeing heartier increases. According to NACE, information sciences and systems graduates earn $43,053 a year, up 8.2 percent from a year earlier, while computer science graduates make $49,691 a year, up 4.8 percent.

Just further evidence that the US economy is strong and getting stronger.

President Bush made a pitch for universal broadband recently, a vital tool in the war on terror:

Remember, we’re still in a battle against ideological extremists who use terrorism as a tool to frighten, scare, kill people such as us who love freedom. And, therefore, what I’m telling you is as broadband expands, it’s going to enable us better to protect our homeland, which is a vital concern of any of us in our government.

He pitched three technologies, 1) powerline:

We need to use our power lines better. They go everywhere. It seems to make sense, doesn’t it, if what you’re looking for is avenues into the home. Well, electricity goes into the home. And so one great opportunity is to spread broadband throughout America via our power lines.

and 2) WiFi:

We’re setting up a wi-fi hot zone, which means our citizens are more likely to be more productive than the citizens from a neighboring community. It’s a great opportunity.

and enhanced cellular data services:

Another kind of wireless broadband would be more wide-ranging. It would be based on mobile wireless. It wouldn’t depend on a physical connection to an existing cable or telephone modem as wi-fi does.

In response, John Kerry pitched his three preferred forms of communication, telegraph, telephone, and tell-a-woman.

Linus Torvalds is coming to town:

“The plan was to try to acclimatize and have time to grow webbed feet (although I’m told there are implants available) by moving during the summer,” he wrote.

He’ll fit right in, it’s just like his native Finland only wetter.

Spirit of America is an excellent cause, even though the scourge of humanity thinks blogs are too pure to be sullied by charity.

Link via Mr. Jarvis.