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THE VIEW FROM CHAOS MANOR

View 359 April 25 - May 1, 2005

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Monday April 25, 2005

I am putting this up the night before so it will be easy to add in the morning. I am at WinHEC in Seattle. There was a lot of good mail raising important questions yesterday. See that until I get something going here from WinHEC.

A long and exhausting day, information overload. Since BYTE pays for this trip I pretty well have to put most of what I get from it into the column, but there were moments. Bill Gates was bored by his own speech, probably because Longhorn is still shipping "Holidays, 2006" and that's mostly what Micorosft is dong. And there was not one single "Call to Action" during the keynotes. "Wiffy" Allchin was not present at all.

The breakout sessions were interesting, but I probably got more about the future of hardware from Peter Glaskowsky at dinner tonight than from the panel this afternoon. WinHEC used to have Michael Slater, then Peter Glaskowsky, do an entire morning session on chips designs and the future of the processors; they cut that out a year ago, which was a big mistake so far as I am concerned. But it means I get to pick his brain in an exclusive, so it's good for me if not so good for the conference.

WinHEC is still worth the trip and if you're in the design business you have to come to it, but it's not as good as it was when I first began attending them.

 

 

 

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Tuesday, April 26, 2005   

  Still at WinHEC, then off to Space Development.

Opening a new round in the IQ and heredity debates in MAIL.  Now I am off to hear about the future of Windows.

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Another long and exhausting day. Management Stacks and Vitualization layers, and hardware advances allow great increases in reliability and redundancy. It's all in your future including the possibility of management of your big Windows network through an underlying LINUX OS... Ain't competition wonderful?

Intel has two CPU's on one chip frame; AMD has true dual core chips with their own Northbridge in the same silicon. Intel is playing catchup just now. And I have Windows Server 2003 for 64-bit systems; I'll be building a new server shortly.

 

 

 

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Wednesday, April 27, 2005 

Another exhausting day. Much about security including Internet Explorer. A lot about partitioning and management and virtual machines. Information overload mode.

WinHEC is over, the shortest one of my memory, and tomorrow AM I go to Los Angeles, then drive to Phoenix for the Space Development Conference, where I'll be speaking Saturday evening.

Then it's column time, and working on Inferno, and I am picking up some work on Janissaries IV (Mamelukes) and it's a great life if you don't weaken...

 

 

 

 

 

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Thursday, April 28, 2005

On the fusion story:

April 28, 2005

Itty-Bitty and Shrinking, Fusion Device Has Big Ideas By KENNETH CHANG

In a surprising feat of miniaturization, scientists are reporting today that they have produced nuclear fusion - the same process that powers the sun - in a footlong cylinder just five inches in diameter. And they say they will soon be able to make the device even smaller.

While the device is probably too inefficient to produce electricity or other forms of energy, the scientists say, egg-size fusion generators could someday find uses in spacecraft thrusters, medical treatments and scanners that search for bombs.

The findings, by a team at the University of California, Los Angeles, led by Dr. Seth J. Putterman, are being reported in the journal Nature.

The minifusion device accelerates hydrogen atoms and slams them together to produce helium. Unlike earlier claims of tabletop fusion - "cold fusion," in 1989, which suggested that energy could be produced by running electricity through water and metal plates, and "sonofusion," in 2002, in which collapsing bubbles supposedly heat gases to starlike temperatures - this report is not being greeted with skepticism.

"I think it's very persuasive," said Dr. William Happer, a professor of physics at Princeton.

Dr. Michael J. Saltmarsh, a retired scientist who worked at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, said the energy of the particles emitted by the collisions convincingly matched what was expected for fusion. Dr. Saltmarsh was one of two Oak Ridge scientists who said they were unable to detect the signatures of fusion in the 2002 sonofusion experiment.

 So we won't be powering the nation from this. Not for a while anyway.

========

I am at the gate having got past TSA without Incident other than having  to remove my shoes then put them on in a narrow passage blocking impatient people. It was not disclosed why I had to take off my Shoes.  mysterious areas the ways of TSA.

 

 

 

 

 

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Friday, April 29, 2005

I am in Phoenix, having flown home, spent an hour, then driven all this way for the Space Development Conference.

Slept in a bit late. More later.

 

 

 

 

 

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Saturday, April 30, 2005

Still in Phoenix. Still blathering about space.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Sunday, May 1, 2005

Woke this morning with what I thought might be Legionnaire's Disease, I felt so bad. Fortunately Jim Ransom is driving back with me so I won't have to drive. I doubt I'd make it.

====

Home safe. Drove for a bit but well before the California border I found myself in no condition to drive. I'm writing this Tuesday Morning so you'll have the idea.

It was "just a virus" but I guess this one was a doozy. It sure shut me down.

 

 

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This is a day book. It's not all that well edited. I try to keep this up daily, but sometimes I can't. I'll keep trying. See also the monthly COMPUTING AT CHAOS MANOR column, 8,000 - 12,000 words, depending.  (Older columns here.) For more on what this page is about, please go to the VIEW PAGE. If you have never read the explanatory material on that page, please do so. If  you got here through a link that didn't take you to the front page of this site, click here for a better explanation of what we're trying to do here. This site is run on the "public radio" model; see below.

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