NVIDIA launches Tesla: GPUs are the new CPUs
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Thursday, June 21, 2007
JVC designs tiny 4k D-ILA chip
JVC announced at InfoComm 2007 a 1.27-inch 4K2K D-ILA chip for use in projectors that offer up more than four times high-definition resolution. Intended initially for medical, modeling, and simulation use, the chip can produce a ten-megapixel 4096x2400 pixel image with a 20,000:1 contrast ratio. While DLP-based 4K projectors are currently in use in some digital cinemas, the JVC chip will be used in D-ILA, a variant of LCoS (Liquid Crystal on Silicon), and has a higher pixel density. Much like professional racing technologies trickle down to the average sedan on the street, the research that goes into 4K projectors can also make their way to HDTVs in the home, bringing smaller, higher-definition sets to a living room near you. We say bring on the quad-split-screen HD!
Lessig switches from copyright to corruption
Cory Doctorow: Last week, at the International Creative Commons Summit in Dubrovnik, Croatia, Lawrence Lessig made a stunning announcement: he is going to retire from copyfighting and take up a new career, fighting for a new issue. He's going to stay involved with Creative Commons as its CEO, but from now on, he's working to fry a bigger fish: the corruption that leads countries to make bad copyright laws and other regulations, even when they know that the laws are bad for their society.
Larry has posted an expanded piece about this to his blog, explaining his decision to move on after ten years. He suggests that the open Internet and a culture of sharing and remix will make it easier to fight the bigger problem of corruption.
Lessig inspired me -- his writing and work changed my life forever, and I'm not the only one. It's amazing to see him moving on to tackle this new issue. I'm looking forward to following where he leads.
From a public policy perspective, the question of extending existing copyright terms is, as Milton Friedman put it, a "no brainer." As the Gowers Commission concluded in Britain, a government should never extend an existing copyright term. No public regarding justification could justify the extraordinary deadweight loss that such extensions impose.LinkYet governments continue to push ahead with this idiot idea -- both Britain and Japan for example are considering extending existing terms. Why?
The answer is a kind of corruption of the political process. Or better, a "corruption" of the political process. I don't mean corruption in the simple sense of bribery. I mean "corruption" in the sense that the system is so queered by the influence of money that it can't even get an issue as simple and clear as term extension right. Politicians are starved for the resources concentrated interests can provide. In the US, listening to money is the only way to secure reelection. And so an economy of influence bends public policy away from sense, always to dollars.
The point of course is not new. Indeed, the fear of factions is as old as the Republic. There are thousands who are doing amazing work to make clear just how corrupt this system has become. There have been scores of solutions proposed. This is not a field lacking in good work, or in people who can do this work well.
Tuesday, June 19, 2007
Gold farming in China makes the NYT
Cory Doctorow: Julian Dibbell, author of the stellar Play Money (a book about making real money in virtual worlds), has a great NYT feature up about the life of Chinese gold farmers (a subject I tackle in my story Anda's Game). This story keeps on getting weirder and more interesting.
LinkAt the end of each shift, Li reports the night's haul to his supervisor, and at the end of the week, he, like his nine co-workers, will be paid in full. For every 100 gold coins he gathers, Li makes 10 yuan, or about $1.25, earning an effective wage of 30 cents an hour, more or less. The boss, in turn, receives $3 or more when he sells those same coins to an online retailer, who will sell them to the final customer (an American or European player) for as much as $20. The small commercial space Li and his colleagues work in — two rooms, one for the workers and another for the supervisor — along with a rudimentary workers' dorm, a half-hour's bus ride away, are the entire physical plant of this modest $80,000-a-year business. It is estimated that there are thousands of businesses like it all over China, neither owned nor operated by the game companies from which they make their money. Collectively they employ an estimated 100,000 workers, who produce the bulk of all the goods in what has become a $1.8 billion worldwide trade in virtual items. The polite name for these operations is youxi gongzuoshi, or gaming workshops, but to gamers throughout the world, they are better known as gold farms. While the Internet has produced some strange new job descriptions over the years, it is hard to think of any more surreal than that of the Chinese gold farmer.
See also: Avatars, and the carbon-based meatbags behind them (that's us)
Samsung and Seagate finally match Hitachi with 1TB SATA disks
Months after Hitachi announced their big 3.5-inch, 1TB drive, Samsung and Seagate have finally matched that capacity by sheepishly launching their own 3Gbps SATA disks. Sammy does it all with efficiency boy, by spinning 3x 334GB platters to Hitachi's 5x 200GB platters (10 heads) or Seagate's 4 platters (8 heads) of 250GB each. That little trick should keep the weight, decibels, and power draw of their SpinPoint F1 (pictured) to a minimum. Hitachi's Deskstar 7K1000 still packs that impressive 32MB buffer which Samsung and Seagate can only aspire to with their 16MBs of respective cache. Expect both of the newcomers to be priced around $400. Cheap, but we'll be holding our wad for the inevitable head-to-head (to-head) shootout we're sure somebody is cooking up.
Read -- Seagate Barracuda 7200.10
Read -- Samsung SpinPoint F1
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