IBM has begun to produce PowerPC chips using a new manufacturing process that promises to improve their speed and energy efficiency.

The tech giant plans to announce on Friday that it has started mass production of PowerPCs on the 90-nanometer process, which refers to the average feature size on the chips. (A nanometer is a billionth of a meter.) The PowerPC 970FX, which is used inside IBM’s blade servers and Apple Computer’s Xserve G5 server, is the first processor to be made with this manufacturing method.

Big Blue is expected to describe a 2.5GHz version of the chip made on the 90-nanometer process at the International Solid State Circuits Conference (ISSCC) in San Francisco next week. PowerPCs on the market today, produced on a 130-nanometer process, top out at 2GHz.

To make the new PowerPCs, IBM is combining layers of silicon on insulator (SOI) and strained silicon. Together, the two technologies allow manufacturers to improve energy efficiency or performance: They can either make processors that run as fast as current models but consume far less power; or they can produce chips that use the same amount of power but run at higher clock speeds.

Reducing power consumption is greatest challenge facing chip designers, said Intel Chief Technology Officer Pat Gelsinger and other industry figures. Different manufacturers are adopting different techniques to solve the problem, which has a couple of aspects. First, designers have to figure out how to get all that electricity into a shrinking piece of silicon. Second, the heat generated by this can cause malfunctions.

IBM has long been the primary proponent of silicon on insulator technology, which functions like a sponge. An insulating layer sits below the transistors inside a chip and decreases power consumption by preventing electricity from leaking out.

Invite Michael Kanellos into your in-box Senior department editor Michael Kanellos scrutinizes the hardware industry in a regular Enterprise Hardware column that ranges from chips to servers and other critical business systems.

Strained silicon, by contrast, removes layers and ridges in silicon, which in turn allows electrons to move faster. The concept, which involves inserting large germanium atoms deep in a wafer, was initially introduced in the late 1980s and early 1990s, but was mainly dismissed.

“In ‘85, ‘86 or ‘87, if you proposed this, people would die laughing,” said Bernard Meyerson, chief technology officer at IBM’s Technology group, in an interview last year.

Intel came out with its first chips containing strained silicon earlier this month, when it released Prescott. Intel, however, has not adopted silicon on insulator technology.

For future chips, AMD and other companies are looking at switching from silicon to metal for the gate oxide, a thin layer that helps control the flow of electrons in a transistor.

By Michael Kanellos
Staff Writer, CNET News.com

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This Website now Changes colors. When a user first arrives at the site, the code chooses 1 of 4 possible color schemes to display the site in for the duration of the users visit/set time limit. Upon the users next visit(assuming it has been more than half a day or so) a new random color choice will be selected.

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How To Give The Last-Minute Gift of Blog
By Biz Stone

Okay, it’s officially the last minute and you forgot to get your sister’s roommate a gift. You’re going to their holiday party tonight and you can’t show up empty handed. What do you do? Fear not gentle bloggers, you’ll have a great gift. The gift of blog.

What friend, family member, or colleague wouldn’t want a beautiful new Blogger blog. Don’t they know that Blogger is “The fast, easy, and free way to publish and share your information online?” Well it is. And it’s damn sexy too. The following are instructions for how to set up a brand new, free, Blogger blog for someone as a gift and how to make it seem like you actually gave it some real thought. The giving-it-some-thought part is key to any successful last-minute gifting strategy.

Step 1 — Create A New Blog

First, go to Blogger.com and click the Start Now button. If you’re already a Blogger.com member, just sign in and click the “create a new blog” link. The idea here is to set up a new blog in your own name first. Go through the four steps of setting up a new blog. Keep in mind that the title, description and other settings will eventually be changed by the giftee.
read on

Filters and the Can-Spam Act may hold some unwanted e-mail at bay, but neither approach will bring the pandemic under control, according to a leading spam expert.

Eric Raymond, president of the Open Source Initiative, said a technology that recognizes legitimate senders may prove more efficient at curtailing spam than existing filters, which only work on messages that have been downloaded to servers and PCs.

Raymond, an open-source and antispam activist, spoke last week at the Spam Conference at MIT, a gathering of 500 developers, lawyers and researchers from major universities and technology giants like IBM and Microsoft.

Many of the conference participants agreed that the recently enacted federal Can-Spam Act of 2003, which supercedes more than 30 state laws, has done nothing to reduce the amount of spam on the Internet. Spammers are already flouting the new law, which took effect Jan. 1, 2004, said lawyers speaking at the conference. New and improved antispam technologies, the lawyers said, will be necessary to help counter the proliferation of spam.

Raymond is promoting an antispam technology called SPF (sender permitted from), an open-standard SMTP (simple mail transfer protocol) extension that stops spam before ISPs have to download messages by rejecting those e-mails coming from forged addresses. Under SPF, e-mail users enter their valid domains and IP addresses into the SPF registry. More than 4,000 domains have published their SPF records, including AOL, said Raymond. The registry will also be supported by an upcoming version of SpamAssasin and other antispam applications.

SPF is one of the methods that developers presented at the conference for creating so-called “whitelists,” lists of approved e-mail senders that enable e-mail recipients to welcome messages from those who are on the list while flagging or rejecting others.

Whitelists like SPF will complement other technologies, such as domain blacklists that block out specific senders, by forcing spammers to use their own domains, said Raymond.

“We need more approaches like SPF that attack the problem further upstream, by forcing spammers into the open,” he said.

The new technologies should also lighten the workload carried by Bayesian spam filters, which scan the contents of messages for tip-offs that they are spam — deliberately misspelled words such as “V1AGRA,” for example, or randomly generated sender names such as “Sondra Gaines” or “Herndon Georgia.”

Bayesian filters are a popular method for keeping spam out of inboxes. They are included in some e-mail applications (such as Apple’s Mail and Mozilla Mail), but more often appear as an add-on tool that users can download from the Internet.

Bayesian filters have become victims of their own success, however.

Spammers are pumping out more e-mail than ever in an attempt to squeak past the Bayesian filters. They are breaking apart words, pasting encyclopedia entries into their messages and using other techniques to pass their content off as legitimate.

And while the increased traffic is making spamming more expensive for the spammers, the cost of downloading unwanted e-mail is hurting Internet service providers like AOL and MSN, too.

Story continued on Page 2

Arizona based PhoenixSleep picks ob� Web Technologies Inc. to develop and implement phase 1 of thier internet site. PhoenixSleep is one of the nations top specialists in the diagnosis and treatment of sleep disorders.

The site has been updated with new content and a slightly refined layout.

Web Design 101: If You Build It, They Might Come
by Peter Boyd, Esq.

Every once in awhile, I receive blank stares from lawyers after I tell them how much a good web site will cost. “There is no way we can pay $3,000 or even $5,000 for a web site,” they’ll say.

Even if they realize the costs are justified (because it can take over 50 hours of work to design a web site properly) they’ll argue they simply cannot afford the price. What some people fail to realize is that if the web site generates one new client in its first year, then it will have paid for itself. And in truth, a properly designed site will attract many more clients than that, while also creating a professional image for their law firm.

Instead, attorneys often try a “compromise” technique – spending $999 for a template of ten pages that they can put online themselves. But lacking design and internet marketing background, they unknowingly create sites that are unprofessional and unhelpful – thereby losing potential clients.

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ILW.COM – immigration news: Web Design 101: If You Build It, They Might Come

Delivering the goods

There’s no doubting Google’s power and popularity. Yet few of us use the search engine effectively. Jack Schofield offers some tips

Thursday January 8, 2004
The Guardian

Google is now the world’s most powerful website, and if it goes public this year, its young founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, will become extremely rich. Their five-year-old company has already cracked its biggest problem, which is how to make pots of money from selling advertising space without carrying any banner ads. And while there are other places to search the web, most websites are now dependent on Google for a large proportion of their new visitors. The question that drives all but a few commercial webmasters today is: “How do I change my site to make it appear on the first page when someone searches Google?”

What is even more impressive is that Google has achieved its supremacy by word of mouth: by delivering what users want. That has helped it retain users’ confidence while doing things that might have raised concerns about invasion of privacy elsewhere. For example, Google almost certainly knows more about you than you would tell your mother. Did you ever search for information about Aids, cancer, mental illnesses or bomb-making equipment? Google knows, because it has put a unique reference number in a permanent cookie on your hard drive (which doesn’t expire until 2038). It also knows your internet (IP) address.

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