Software

Connect 360

Connect 360 is a Mac OS X preference pane that lets your play/view content from your Mac OS X computer on your Xbox 360.  It uses iTunes to get the list of tracks and playlist, and iPhoto for photos.  You specify a directory to indicate what videos should be shared.

The demo worked for me, though I only used it to view videos.  The demo will let you view a good number of files.

I would love to use this to view all of my content on my TV.  This would allow me to remove the Mac mini from the AV rack and keep it in the closet.  Unfortunately, the Xbox doesn't support all of the video formats that the Mac mini can, so I would have to transcode many of my videos. 

Tail remote logs

In this post, I mentioned that I was looking for a way to tail log files on a remote computer. Stig commented with a suggestion.  You can specify the sudo and tail command to ssh

ssh user@hostname 'sudo tail -f /var/log/messages'

I am using this solution, but there are two problems:

1. Your password will appear in the clear in the terminal window when entering it for the sudo command
2. sudo has to be configured to work on a non-tty terminal, which could be a security hole.

Repeal Denied

When will Moore's Law be repealed? For the 30+ years I have been in and around the computer industry I have heard that question asked. The reason is obvious: this seemingly magical doubling of computing power per dollar every 18 months has been taking place since the early 1960s and surely has to stop sometime, right? Not yet, it doesn't. Thanks to some clever new ways of making CMOS chips, it looks like Moore's Law will remain in effect for at least another 15 years. This week's column is my attempt to explain why this is so and to give some idea what it means to us all.

Cranky writer's note: this column has a global audience that includes high school kids and Nobel laureates. From time to time in columns like this one I attempt to explain technical issues in broad terms that are understandable by most readers. This inevitably means that some readers (you know who you are) will think the content is simplistic, obvious, already well known to everyone in your PhD program, or simply stupid. Much as it might surprise you, I can live with this and hope that you can, too.

Now back to Moore's Law.

We used to think what would repeal Moore's Law was the simple inability of photolithography to etch ever thinner lines on each silicon wafer. Now that we are well into nanometer feature sizes, though, it is clear that problem has been solved. What hurts us today is heat. The smaller they get the hotter our chips run. So we end up either with elaborate cooling systems or deliberately hobbled performance, or a little of both.

Today's move to dual- and multi-core processors is in direct response to nothing more than the need to effectively increase die size to keep temperatures down. Multi-core chips can also be run at lower clock speeds to keep down heat while relying on more than one core to recover from this apparent performance disadvantage.

This is, of course, in complete defiance of conventional chip company marketing, which says that the smaller you make a chip the less power it consumes and the lower voltage it requires -- that multi-cores are simply multo-fast. However the truth is that lower voltages tend to be a requirement for keeping CPU temperatures down as much as anything and multiple cores are often just a way of gaining increased heat sink area.

This extra chip heat comes generally from four sources. The first is simply reduced surface area; yes the voltage is lower, but if the ratio of old voltage to new voltage is less than the ratio of old surface area to new surface area from the previous product generation and manufacturing process, well then the chip simply has to get hotter, since it is dramatically smaller yet doing the same work. Voltages drop linearly while surface areas decrease as a far more rapid square function.

The second reason chips -- especially microprocessors -- are getting hotter is the demands of keeping various clocks in sync. Using synchronous logic, some significant percentage of transistors is required simply to keep all the clock signals aligned on a 400 million transistor chip. Asynchronous -- clockless -- logic can do away with the need for that extra, power-wasting circuitry, as I wrote about in this space many years ago (it's in this week's links). As such companies including Sun and Intel are trying to make more and more of their chip circuitry asynchronous, but that is a long and crooked path toward chips that consume no power at all in the milliseconds they aren't being used.

But the greatest producers of heat are relatively new on the scene: two forms of current leakage that are especially prevalent at feature sizes substantially below 100 nanometers. The smaller we go the tougher it gets.

The first type of current leakage is called "gate leakage," which is a quantum effect in which electrons mysteriously migrate through materials they aren't supposed to be migrating through. Gate leakage is active, meaning it takes place only when the chip is actually running. Any leakage consumes power and creates heat without doing usable work, so of course we hate it unless, like I did with my old PDP-8, you are relying on your computer to heat your house.

The other form of leakage is called "sub-threshold" and actually takes place when the chip ISN'T doing any work, when it is off. Sub-threshold leakage is generally attributed to very thin layers that don't do a very good job of insulating, as they are SEMI-conductors.

The big problem with gate leakage is that it doesn't scale. You can make the chips smaller by going to a new manufacturing process (from 65 nanometers down to 45 nanometers, for example) and everything scales down EXCEPT the gate leakage, which remains about the same for similar voltages. Since the gate leakage is the same but the chips are a lot smaller, well you can see the problem, which is why you need that liquid cooling system on your over-clocked game PC.

For 45 nanometer processors these two forms of current leakage consume 70 percent of the power used to run the chips. That is unless you do something to reduce the gate leakage. There have been a variety of techniques used to reduce gate leakage and the best known are "strained silicon," in which the gates are put under compression or tension that somehow inhibits leakage; Silicon-on-Insulator (SOI), in which an insulating layer under the silicon inhibits current leakage and high-K (usually hafnium) metal gates, which are less prone to current leakage. If you are a chip designer intent on reducing gate leakage, you ultimately use all three of these techniques in the order I have presented them because that is from least- to most-expensive.

Intel's new Penryn family of 45 nanometer processors announced at the end of last year uses all three techniques.

But there is a new technique on the block for reducing gate leakage from British inventor Robert Mears, best known for leading the team that developed the erbium doped fiber amplifier that has allowed in situ fiber-optic cables to massively increase their ability to carry data by simultaneously using multiple wavelengths of light to carry parallel data streams. This guy made today's Internet possible. Mears has been working since 2001 on Mears Silicon Technology (MST), which is a new kind of semiconductor coating with unique and tunable qualities.

In one sense MST is like Silicon-on-Insulator in that it is a special layer laid down on the entire silicon wafer before further processing. But where SOI solely inhibits leakage down through the underlying insulator layer, the custom MST layer does that and more. MST inhibits vertical current flow where you don't want it and improves current flow in the horizontal plane where you need it for higher performance. And unlike high-K gates, MST is cheap to implement, requiring no exotic materials or new manufacturing equipment. Using MST alone, the two forms of gate leakage can be reduced by 60 to 80 percent while also making the chips run faster. The result is faster, cheaper chips that consume less energy and run cooler.

As always I am too stupid to own stock in Mears Technologies or any of the other companies I write about.

Just because you use MST doesn't mean you can't also use strained silicon, silicon-on-insulator, or high-K gates. This new technology is just another tool for modern process engineers and can be used in any combination to fine-tune performance, energy consumption, or both.

As CMOS fabrication processes get ever smaller (Intel is right now sampling 32 nanometer processors), it becomes possible to use a new gimmick called Thin Field Effect Transistors (Thin FETs), effectively 3-D transistors, which can further reduce the real estate of each transistor. And with a billion transistors on a chip, that size reduction, which goes beyond the traditional feature reduction, can lead to yet further performance improvements. But the problem with Thin FETs is they are difficult to strain, so current leakage goes back up again. Fortunately, according to Mears Technologies, MST works well in 3-D and can save the day for Thin FETs, which we'll see in 32 and 22 nanometer chips coming in the next 3 to 7 years.

But wait there's more! Take the process down to below 10 nanometers and MST can be used for devices using spintronics, where the gate action is based on the controllable spin of a single electron that can be polarized one way or another to either allow or inhibit the passage of current. MST will reportedly allow spintronic devices to operate at room temperature, creating devices like magnetic memory that operate hundreds of times faster than present technologies, turning even Moore's Law on its head.

Look for Mears Technologies, whose American headquarters is in Waltham, Massachusetts, to shortly announce its first licensee, which will likely be a fab plant in Asia.

Now what does all this mean for you and me? It means Moore's Law will remain in effect for at least another 15 years, which is long enough for most of those scary predictions of Ray Kurzweil to come true. You know, predictions like desktop computers with 10,000 times the processing power of my brain.

Though if you put it that way, maybe it's not so impressive after all.

The Big Picture

Up or down? That's what this week's Macworld show came down to for most news organizations. Would the new Apple products make the company's shares go up or down? They went down. Macworld was a bust, we were told repeatedly, as if it really mattered. I don't own Apple stock so I couldn't care less whether it goes up or down, nor could most customers. Apple was supposed to introduce another iPod or iPhone, or iSomething that would sell four million or 10 million copies in the next 200 days, driving share prices higher. But it didn't happen. Apple introduced some cool stuff, but nothing that would sell four million units this year, hence the letdown.

Hogwash.

A bunch of day traders that used to making a quick 10 percent on their money during Macworld week didn't make that 10 percent this year, so they were disappointed. A bunch of reporters eager to write about those day traders making their 10 percent were disappointed, too. Meanwhile, the rest of us who don't care about day traders were left without much perspective on what any of these announcements actually mean. So I'll do the heavy lifting here and gratefully get back to something non-Apple next week.

First let's look at the MacBook Air, which is a cool product with a bad name, though I guess it worked well for Michael Jordan, so what the heck. It is very doubtful that Apple will sell a million Airs in the next year. It is doubtful Apple will sell even half a million Airs and Steve Jobs knows this. What's important here is not the subnotebook computer but the bits of it that will likely make their way into much more interesting Apple products to come.

Take that specially packaged Intel CPU, how did that come about? Steve Jobs didn't beat the heck out of Intel CEO Paul Otellini to get a little CPU that would go into fewer than half a million boxes. Steve did what he always does. He beat the heck out of Paul Otellini with the promise that this little CPU -- for which we can expect Apple will hold some exclusive for the next six months -- will end up in millions and millions of Apple products, nearly all of them costing a lot less than a MacBook Air.

Apple is very important to Intel. Though nobody says it out loud, Apple is the last of the major computer companies that uses 100 percent Intel processors. And Apple's ability to do more with less has to be a continual inspiration to its competitors. As Apple slides further and further into the consumer electronics and networking markets, Intel will be right there, too. I still expect we'll see an Apple tablet this year, for example, and it will use this same Intel CPU.

How about that new trackpad with the multi-touch interface? Could that be the first look at that mouse replacement I predicted would be coming from Apple this year? Maybe. You can be sure we'll see a lot more of that baby.

What about the Air's lack of an optical drive? It's hard to find a place for an optical drive in such a thin computer, but isn't Steve Jobs the guy who when he returned to Apple railed against notebooks without removable media, like the PowerBook 100 and 2400 and the various PowerBook Duos? Why did Steve change his mind now? Because Steve wants to replace optical drives of any sort with bits provided over the network, preferably from iTunes. That's also why we didn't see an Apple Blu-ray announcement this week and -- if Jobs has his way -- we'll never see one.

Let's turn now to the second-generation Apple TV and the question I seem to be the only one asking: why did they drop the price to $229? Had they dropped the price to $99 I'd say, "Okay, they've decided to lose money on this thing to grow the rental market." But why $229? Did some focus group tell Apple there was price resistance to the Apple TV above $230? It's a set-top box! People don't want to pay anything for a set-top box and if they do pay something they sure don't want to pay $299 OR $229.

The entire Apple TV category is a minefield for Steve Jobs. It's a tiny Macintosh, remember, though with its innate Macness carefully hidden. Steve COULD HAVE blown the doors off Macworld if he had simply allowed the Apple TV to BE a Mac, albeit limited to HDMI displays. If you could buy a Mac that attaches to your HDTV for web surfing as well as all the other Apple TV functions, even at the original $299 price, it would have been a HUGE hit. But it might also have hurt Mac Mini and iMac sales, so Steve couldn't bring himself to do it.

In the long run I think the whole Apple TV product category will be subsumed into the television, itself. Here, too, is another minefield because people replace their computers a lot more often than they replace their televisions, so Apple going into the TV business (like Dell and HP have) might help sales at first but later hurt. The more likely move for Apple, therefore, is to eventually create the Apple TV Nano, which is an Apple TV built into a CableCard. This is technically feasible right now and 18 months from now it will be a no-brainer. The big HDTV vendors would jump on that one like crazy since it would drive CableCard-equipped HDTV sales, which have been less than stellar.

Apple's movie rental service offers a lot to talk about, too, though the part I find most interesting is simply the likely impact on broadband ISPs. It's not just Apple, but also Amazon, Netflix, and others that will drive this impact, though those competing efforts are accelerating right now because of Apple.

The broadband ISPs are already jostling for advantage, talking about limiting throughput and making people pay $30 for the bandwidth to download an HD movie. They simply don't want to pay for the additional backbone capacity required to support this level of traffic. But the even bigger reason why the ISPs are moving right now is they perceive a perfect storm that will allow them to RAISE PRICES. Whether we are talking about a cable company or a phone company, these ISPs make more profit from selling broadband than they do from selling their original service, whether it is phone or TV. Cable prices keep going up, true, but nearly all of that goes for increasing costs for content. Internet content costs an ISP nothing, but that doesn't mean they won't try to charge us more if they can.

What's crazy about this is that most of the HD content we're getting upset about is static. It is perfectly reasonable to put every movie ever made on a server and put just such a server in every cable company or DSL machine room and never have to touch the Internet backbone for that content, which is exactly what I've explained the big ISPs are already starting to do through IP multicast. But now they'll want to be paid for it. The dark horse here is Google, which has spent a couple years positioning itself to offer to handle this service on behalf of ISPs and consumers alike in exchange for us watching some commercials. If it is up to consumers, Google will succeed.

And Steve Jobs knows this, because with their interlocking boards, Apple and Google have to know precisely what the other is up to.

So Macworld was just another step in a very measured plan to establish global media dominance for Apple and probably for Google, too. But it's a plan that requires patience, which the press can't -- or doesn't want to -- understand. So it is up to us as individuals to decide whether this is good or bad. I'd say the jury is still out on that one.

links for 2008-01-13

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