Common Paradox Tech Blog

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Are you worried Fermi is going to make your GeForce 8800 look a bit long in the tooth? Well just be glad you’re not stuck trying to run Crysis on the Secret Service’s mainframe featuring state of the art technology from the 1980’s.  A classified review of the aging computer system has revealed that the system is now only operational about 60 percent of the time, and frequently prevents them from accessing the master database of mission critical information and apps.

 "We have here a premiere law enforcement organization in our country which is responsible for the security of the president and the vice president and other officials of our government, and they have to have better IT than they have," said Lieberman, who is chairman of the Senate Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee. Currently the NSA runs 42 mission-oriented applications on a 1980s IBM mainframe, and are hideously underpowered based on the agencies current requirements.

The price tag for updating the system is a mere $187 million, and far below the $33 million they currently have in the budget. If I were president, I would probably check the seat cushions on Air Force One to make up the difference, they are charged with saving his life after all.

(Image Credit ABC.com)

Online retail is nothing new, but now brick and mortar stores want to get in on the high-tech action. The New York Times has a disquieting look at new technologies that will make you shop ’til your signal drops.

Take, for example, Norma Kamali’s boutique in Manhattan, which recently implemented a system called ScanLife that allows shoppers to find more information on products from their smart phones. So far, so good. But ScanLife also lets shoppers buy those products from their phones, even when seen in passing in a display window, even when the store is closed. Impulse buying just got a whole lot more impulsive.

Sure, ScanLife will certainly make physical shopping more convenient, but you have to wonder if it’s going to make shopping too convenient.

Whereas ScanLife could make it dangerously easy for you to spend your money, another system called Presence, developed by IBM, could make it downright annoying to do so. Presence tracks you as you walk through the store and reminds you of things you might have forgotten you wanted to buy. By way of example, the Times article describes a trip to the supermarket in which Presence beams coupons to your phone in real time as you walk through the aisles and suggests items that would go well with the one you just put in your cart.

Of course, shoppers will have the option of using these new systems; no one is going to force you to augment your shopping. But at the same time, the internet age has a way of sweeping people up into using new technologies, even when the headaches equal the benefits. Presence could let you pinpoint an item’s location in an unfamiliar grocery store, but would this capability be worth it if it came at the price of shopping with an overbearing digital assistant?

The article mentions Crate & Barrel and Walmart specifically as companies who are interested in these types of systems, but you can be sure that all major retailers are considering software that let you use your gadgets to spend more money on their products. Still, I imagine that many people will be content keep on window shopping the old-school way, without their phones and without their credit cards. [New York Times]

Online retail is nothing new, but now brick and mortar stores want to get in on the high-tech action. The New York Times has a disquieting look at new technologies that will make you shop ’til your signal drops.

Take, for example, Norma Kamali’s boutique in Manhattan, which recently implemented a system called ScanLife that allows shoppers to find more information on products from their smart phones. So far, so good. But ScanLife also lets shoppers buy those products from their phones, even when seen in passing in a display window, even when the store is closed. Impulse buying just got a whole lot more impulsive.

Sure, ScanLife will certainly make physical shopping more convenient, but you have to wonder if it’s going to make shopping too convenient.

Whereas ScanLife could make it dangerously easy for you to spend your money, another system called Presence, developed by IBM, could make it downright annoying to do so. Presence tracks you as you walk through the store and reminds you of things you might have forgotten you wanted to buy. By way of example, the Times article describes a trip to the supermarket in which Presence beams coupons to your phone in real time as you walk through the aisles and suggests items that would go well with the one you just put in your cart.

Of course, shoppers will have the option of using these new systems; no one is going to force you to augment your shopping. But at the same time, the internet age has a way of sweeping people up into using new technologies, even when the headaches equal the benefits. Presence could let you pinpoint an item’s location in an unfamiliar grocery store, but would this capability be worth it if it came at the price of shopping with an overbearing digital assistant?

The article mentions Crate & Barrel and Walmart specifically as companies who are interested in these types of systems, but you can be sure that all major retailers are considering software that let you use your gadgets to spend more money on their products. Still, I imagine that many people will be content keep on window shopping the old-school way, without their phones and without their credit cards. [New York Times]

When you’ve got mountains of data to work through, you need something larger than a teaspoon. IBM’s solution is the Power7 processor–the equivalent  of Krupp’s Bagger 288–which makes the task of deconstructing those mountains of data a whole lot simpler.

The Power7 processor is for server use. It has 1.2 billion transistors, and up to eight cores. Each core can run up to four threads simultaneously, allowing 32 parallel tasks. Each chip comes with 8GB of embedded DRAM per core, which eliminates the need for a separate L3 cache chip. Throughput is four times great than that of the Power6 chip. And, each system can be divided into as many as 1,000 virtual systems running multiple operating systems. (Sorry, Windows is not one of those operating systems.)

As you’d expect, this type of power doesn’t come cheap. An entry level Power 750 Express system costs in the neighborhood of $34,000. No word on what the top-of-the-line Power 780 system costs, but with eight 4.1GHz quad-core units, 2TB of DDR3 RAM, and 24 SSDs, it’s pricing won’t be for the faint-of-heart.

Image Credit: IBM

Dan Jones writes “As discussed here last year, IBM has made good on its promise to release the Power7 processor (and servers) in the first half of 2010. The Power7 processor adds more cores and improved multithreading capabilities to boost the performance of servers requiring high up-time, according to Big Blue. Power7 chips will run between 3.0GHz and 4.14GHz and will come with four, six, or eight cores. The chips are being made using the 45-nm process technology. New Power7 servers (up to 64 cores for now) are said to deliver twice the performance of older Power6 systems, but are four times more energy efficient. Power7 servers will run AIX and Linux.” And reader shmG notes Intel’s release of a new Itanium server processor after two years of delays. The Power7 specs would seem to put the new Intel chip in the shade.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

File this one away for the future: graphene transistors. Graphene makes use of carborn rather than silicon, and transistors produced from it are capable of operating at 100 gigahertz, or about ten times faster than the fastest silicon transistors. And IBM has figured out a way to make production of these little beauties commercially feasible.

Graphene transistors aren’t new. But the methods for making them are clumsy and inefficient. For example, sheets of graphene would be flaked away from graphite–a tricky process at best. And it could only produce transistors with speeds up to 26 gigahertz.

IBM has devised a method for ‘growing’ graphene transistors on the surface of a two-inch silicon carbide wafer. The wafter is heated until the silicon evaporates, leaving behind a thin layer of epitaxial graphene, from which a transistor is produced. In addition, IBM improved the process by using better materials for parts of the transistor, such as the insulator.

Speedier transistors translate into speedier computing. Graphene transistors, therefore, hold promise for bumping up hardware potential on motherboards and add-in cards. (Not CPUs, though–graphene won’t work for CPUs.) While things will get speedier, for us it won’t be right away. Projected first applications will be in military devices. After that, maybe, graphene transistors will work their way into consumer electronics.

Image Credit: IBM

Asadullah Ahmad writes “IBM has created transistors made from carbon atoms, which operate at 100 gigahertz, while using a manufacturing process that is compatible with current semiconductor fabrication. With silicon close to its physical limits, graphene seems like a viable replacement until quantum computing gets to desktop. Quoting: ‘Researchers have previously made graphene transistors using laborious mechanical methods, for example by flaking off sheets of graphene from graphite; the fastest transistors made this way have reached speeds of up to 26 gigahertz. Transistors made using similar methods have not equaled these speeds.’” The other day we discussed what sounds like similar research by a group of scientists at Tohoku University; that team did not produce transistors, however.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

IBM has acquired Chicago-based software firm Initiate Systems. Initiate helps healthcare providers and other government organizations manage and organize data across various sources. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

It appears that the acquisition is aimed at boosting IBM’s healthcare offerings. According to IBM, Initiate’s software us currently in use at more than 2,400 healthcare sites, over 40 health information exchanges and multiple government health systems around the world including CVS/Caremark, Blue Cross Blue Shield, United Healthcare Services and the Department of Veterans Affairs.

coondoggie writes “The Department of Energy and IBM are serious about developing controversial lithium air batteries capable of powering a car for 500 miles on a single charge – a huge increase over current plug-in batteries that have a range of about 40 to 100 miles, the DOE said. The agency said 24 million hours of supercomputing time out of a total of 1.6 billion available hours at Argonne and Oak Ridge National Laboratories will be used by IBM and a team of researchers from those labs and Vanderbilt University to design new materials required for a lithium air battery.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.