Richtig said Fred!

It appears the new Apple Store that opened in New York with its “all glass look” is not without problems. Maybe some of you remember the G4 Cube and its infamous cracks-in-case problems. Let’s hope their new store doesn’t develop the same problems, still it would appear that the all glass elevator got stuck this week, trapping Apple Customers inside for 45 minutes. Is this elevator a new implementation of DRM that protects customers against themselves?

You can see which designer they hired to design their new store by comparing it to the Apple G4 Cube.

Customers enjoying Apple’s first DRM-Compliant Elevator

If you want to read all about the Apple iStuck elevator incident, visit Blogspot.com.

It would appear so according to a funny net quiz. I wonder how the founders of Google would score with their “Don’t be evil!” motto.

Test your Evilness on http://home.att.net/~slugbutter/evil/

Please support Amnesty International and Reporters without Borders by posting censored content on your website.

The content will look like this (this is actual censored material):

If you want to give a hand and help disseminate censored information, visit irrepressible.info’s Home Page or give them a hand and help disseminate censored information.

According to HPCWire.com the Cell processor in the upcoming PS3 does indeed pack some very high performance computing capabilities. They compare it in multiple scientific applications where number crunching is all the processor does, and the results are impressive even compared to the current batch of 64 bit processors like the Athlon 64, the Itanium 2 and even the Cray X1E (that’s a supercomputer). Ok here’s a hint about the results, the Cell does not win all the benchmarks all the time, sometimes the Cray X1E is a bit better, but if you put the benchmarks in comparison to the pricing of these different processors, well the Cell wins them all. Haven’t I told you the PS3 was dirt cheap as a linux supercomputing workstation on May 16th. Here’s a single chart from the paper published by the members of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory’s Computational Research Division. This chart compares Fast Fourrier Transformations in the different processors (FFTs are used in Digital Signal Processing very extensively, to convert MP3s for example), check the second column for actual Cell Performance:

You might want to read HPCWire.com’s article on the Cell Processor.
If you want to read Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory’s Computational Research Division’s article on the The Potential of the Cell Processor for Scientific Computing (PDF)
If you want to learn more about Fast Fourrier Transforms (FFTs), visit Wikipedia.org.

Here is a picture of the 100$ laptop project, there are 3 prototypes on that picture:

If you want to learn more about the 100$ laptop, visit the One Laptop Per Child project.
If you want to see more pictures of the prototypes visit Flickr.com.

According to Yahoo News, the European Commission has determined that computer programs won’t be patentable and that the European Patent Office will be bound by the new law. This is indeed a great victory for everyone involved in computer software (except for programmers in the US) and it will probably give an edge to companies both small and large who are based in Europe compared to their US counterpart which will get dragged in futile lawsuits related to software patents.

Read all about it on Yahoo! News.

Here’s an interesting update to my Wed 5 Apr post about AMD’s processor Roadmap .

QUAD CORE CPUs! I quote from the article on The Register “The company still plans to deliver a four-core chip in 2007[…]”. So that prediction was right on the spot and my guess is that 8 core CPUs are probably planned somewhere in 2009.

REVERSE MULTITHREADING: A french site named x86-secret.com has also published information about AMD’s future K10 processor in which they are researching reverse multithreading which would basically make a multiple core CPU act as a single core CPU so that applications that are not aware or multi threaded would still benefit from the multiple core!

The article confirming Quad Core CPUs can be read on The Register.
You can read x86-secret.com article on Reverse Multithreading (in french only)
The Reg Hardware has also an article on Reverse Multithreading

Here’s a funny picture about an anti-DRM protest that was held in front of Microsoft’s WinHEC conference yesterday. The protesters were wearing Hazmat Suits to demonstrate their slogan “Defective by Design!”.

You can visit the Free Software Foundation’s information page on DRM.
If you want to see more information about the protest you can visit www.defectivebydesign.org.
If you want to see more pictures of Hazmat suits and the protest, visit their page on Flickr.

For all of you that are not afraid of PayPal. There is a service called Payloadz Express that allows to easily set up a Pay for Download service that works with PayPal too, it’s called Payloads Express. If you make less than 100$ in revenues per month the service has no monthly charges too (your file quota is limited to 20 megabytes though).

You can visit Payloadz Express if you want to learn more.

Apple has decided that no information is the best security after all. So they are closing down the source of Darwin for their newer x86/Intel based Macs. It will probably cause some legitimate users problems because they won’t be able to get involved in its development. Closed source never seems to be an issue when security researchers are searching for holes on Windows, why does Apple think it would be any different on their platform? The only result achieved here will be that holes will probably take more time to fix since only the Apple team will be able to perform code audits and produce patches.

How can Apple take from the open source community and later decide it won’t give anything back? Well it’s the fundamental difference between the Artistic License and the GNU Public License, in the first you can take and decide if you want to give some back or none at all, if OSX had been based on GNU it would have prevented them from distributing a version without its source code. That’s sad for all Macs users everywhere and open source in general.

You can read about Apple switching to a security through obscurity model on Macworld.