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.
Opening a new
round in the IQ and heredity debates in
MAIL. Now I am off to hear about the future of Windows.
===================
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.
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...
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.
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.
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
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If you have never read the explanatory material on that page, please do so.
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If
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