Dr. Dobb's Journal December 2003
At the Custom Integrated Circuits Conference (http://www.ieee-cicc.org/), Sun Microsystems researchers introduced a new technique for chip-to-chip communications that they hope will let chipmakers eliminate wires connecting chips on a circuit board. The new "proximity communication" technology relies on capacitive coupling; tiny transmitters in one chip are placed next to receivers in an adjacent chip, allowing data to flow wirelessly between the two chips. The Sun team reported that they were able to send data at speeds of 21.6 billion bits per second using this technique, which is less than half the speed that today's processors can achieve. Theoretically, however, more than a trillion bits per second could be exchanged. But proximity communication is not without its problems. With hundreds of chips packed together, cooling would be a significant issue; and there is also potential for interference between the transmitters and receivers.
The International Challenge for Eclipse (ICE) is a programming contest designed to see who can develop the best or most unique plug-ins for Eclipse, an open, royalty-free tools-integration platform that lets you work with tools from different vendors in an integrated, portal-like environment. Sponsored by Eclipse Consortium (http://www.eclipse.org/) members Akamai Technologies, Embarcadero Technologies, Ensemble Systems, Genuitec, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Instantiations, and QNX Software, ICE prizes include IBM ThinkPads, Hewlett-Packard iPAQ pocket PCs, a trip to the European Theory and Practice of Software conference in Barcelona, and more. The deadline for submissions is December 8, 2003. Judging will take place by IBM and Eclipse experts from sponsoring companies, with winners announced in February 2004. For more information, see http://www.scs.carleton.ca/ ~deugo/ice/.
A proposal within ISO to charge usage royalties for the country, currency, and language codes it worked to standardize is provoking alarm among other Standards bodies. ISO owns the copyrights on the ISO 3166, ISO 4217, and ISO 639 Standards, which list the codes. Though the organization has always charged a fee for access to the Standards, the new proposal would impose additional fees whenever the codes were used in software applications or on the Web. INCITS, the W3C, and Unicode have all protested the proposal; in a letter to the president of ISO, Tim Berners-Lee wrote, "These and similar codes are widely used on the Web... Any charges for the use of these Standards are going to lead to fragmentation, delay in deployment, and in effect a lack of standardization. In particular, those users who depend upon multilingual or nonEnglish language services will suffer."
Ecma International, a not-for-profit association for technology developers (http://www.ecma-international.org/), has created a task group (TG5) to oversee development of a standard set of language extensions to create a binding between ISO Standard C++ and the Common Language Infrastructure (CLI). CLI is an ISO-standardized, language-neutral runtime environment that supports garbage collection, security, and the like. Standardizing the syntax and semantics of a general-purpose binding for C++ and the CLI lets developers more easily write applications that make full use of the CLI platform.
A lawsuit filed in Los Angeles, California, objects to the notation used by manufacturers to indicate the capacity of hard-disk drives, saying that a "20 GB" drive in reality has only 18.6 GB of usable capacity. Apple Computer, Dell, Gateway, HP, IBM, Sharp, Sony, and Toshiba are named defendants in the suit, which is seeking class action status. The heart of the complaint is that manufacturers label hard-drive capacities in decimal notation, even though computers themselves use the binary system: A decimal gigabyte is 1,000,000,000 bytes, but a binary gigabyte is 1,073,741,824 bytes, so 20 decimal gigabytes equals only 18.6 binary gigabytes. The discrepancy between the two figures becomes larger, of course, as the size of hard drives increases.
The plaintiffs in the suit are asking for monetary restitution, an injunction preventing the manufacturers from using decimal notation to describe hard-drive size, and an order requiring the manufacturers to publicly disclose their labeling practices.