Jos Kirps's Popular Science and Technology Blog
Happy Birthday, Galaxiki!
July 01, 2008Exactly one year ago a very special community website was officially launched.
On July 1st 2007, Galaxiki started as something really new: it's a wiki based science fiction galaxy consisting of millions of stars, planets and moons that can be edited by its community.
Each star, each planet and each moon is represented by an editable wiki page, and the solar systems are all part of an online galaxy that can be explored using a galactical map.
Galaxiki instantly got a lot of positive reviews. It was "website of the day" on Yahoo, About.com, Pocketlint and RedOrbit. It was also community website of the week in Linux Journal.
Today the Galaxiki community consists of more than 2700 users, there are thousands of stars, planets and moons that have been edited, creating an entire new online world. Community members are writing sci-fi stories and publish them as part of stellar histories or they get posted in the community blog.
In April 2008 Galaxiki also published an exclusive interview with british actor David Prowse, who is best known for his role as Darth Vader in the original Star Wars trilogy.
A lot of improvements and new features are planned to become available within the next few months, and the Galaxiki community is looking forward to continue expanding this amazing fictional universe.
Visit the Galaxiki community site:
www.galaxiki.org
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Changes
June 30, 2008There have to be changes from time to time, and I think this year it's time for some *major* changes. I can't reveal any details today, but I think I'll have to announce some important news within the next few weeks.
During the past few weeks I didn't have much time to post news in my blog or to keep my website up to date, things should normalize very soon.
Stay tuned...
Jos
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Did You Ever Hear Of A ZISC Processor?
April 24, 2008I accidentaly found this information on Wikipedia today and I must admit that I never heard of ZISC before.
ZISC stands for Zero Instruction Set Computer (just as RISC stands for Reduced Instruction Set Computer and CISC for Complex Instruction Set Computer). A ZISC processor doesn't use any instructions at all, it purely relies on pattern matching.
The concept was invented by Guy Paillet and is based on ideas from artificial neural networks and massively hardwired parallel processing. The first ZISC processor was the IBM ZISC36 containing 36 independent cells that can be thought of as neurons or parallel processors. Each of these can compare an input vector of up to 64 bytes with a similar vector stored in the cell's memory. If the pattern matches the number of the matched cell will be returned.
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Happy birthday, Max Planck!
April 22, 2008Max Planck was born 150 years ago on April 23, 1858 in Kiel, Holstein, Germany. He is considered to be the founder of quantum theory, and one of the most important physicists of the twentieth century.
When he was 9 years old his family moved to Munich. He enrolled in the Maximilians gymnasium school, where mathematician Hermann Müller taught him astronomy, mechanics and mathematics. He graduated early, at age 17. His physics professor advised Planck against going into physics, saying that everything important had already been discovered. Nevertheless he began his studies in 1874 at the University of Munich.
In April 1885 he became an associate professor of theoretical physics at the University of Kiel. Two years later he married Marie Merck, they had four children (Karl, Emma, Grete and Erwin). 1892 he finally became a full professor.In 1894 Planck turned his attention to the problem of black-body radiation. It was still a mystery why the intensity of the electromagnetic radiation emitted by a black body depends on the frequency of the radiation and the temperature of the body. In 1900 he finally proposed his solution, claiming that electromagnetic energy could be emitted only in quantized form - the quantum theory was born.
Energy can only be a multiple of an elementary unit E = h ν, where h is Planck's constant and ν is the frequency of the radiation. The discovery of Planck's constant enabled him to define a new universal set of physical units (such as the Planck length and the Planck mass ), all based on fundamental physical constants.
In 1905 the completely unknown Albert Einstein publish the articles in a physics journal. Planck was among the few who immediately recognized the significance of the special theory of relativity. Thanks to his influence this theory was soon widely accepted in Germany.
In July 1909 Marie Planck died, two years later he married his second wife, Marga von Hoesslin. They had one child (Herrmann Planck). During the First World War Planck's oldest son, Karl, was killed in action at Verdun, and Erwin was taken prisoner by the French in 1914. Grete died in 1917 while giving birth to her first child.
Meanwhile Planck had been appointed dean of Berlin University, whereby it was possible for him to call Einstein to Berlin and establish a new professorship for him. Soon the two scientists became close friends and met frequently to play music together.
During the First World War Planck signed the infamous " Manifesto of the 93 intellectuals ", a polemic pamphlet of war propaganda, while Einstein retained a strictly pacifistic attitude which almost led to his imprisonment. In 1915 Planck revoked parts of the Manifesto, and in 1916 he signed a declaration against German annexationism.
In 1918 Max Planck was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for this discovery of the quantum theory, which should become the most successful physical theory of all times.
When the Nazis seized power in 1933, Planck was 74. He was critizised for continuing to teach the theories of Einstein and the Nazis started an investigation of Planck's ancestry. At the end of 1938 the Prussian Academy was taken over by Nazis, Planck protested by resigning his presidency. In January 1945 his second son, Erwin, was executed by the Gestapo because of his participation in the failed attempt to assassinate Hitler in July 1944.
Max Planck died shortly after the end of the war on October 4, 1947.
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A short history of the PowerPC as a desktop processor
April 16, 2008In 1994 I switched from DOS/Windows to the Mac, my first Apple computer was a PowerMac 7100AV with 16 MB Ram and a 500 MB harddisk (quite a lot back then). It was the first generation of Macs using a PowerPC processor (prior models used Motorola 68k CPUs) and it ran System 7. 1. 2 (they didn't call it "MacOS" yet if I remember well).
PowerPC is a RISC microprocessor architecture created by Apple, IBM and Motorola in the early 1990s. It's largely based on the earlier IBM POWER architecture and the Motorola 88k bus, it was designed to be a desktop CPU but today it has also become a quite popular embedded CPU. Apple used the PowerPC in their Macintosh computers from 1994 to 2006 (when they transitioned to Intel x86), and a lot of popular game consoles are also based on the PowerPC architecture, including the Sony Playstation, the M$ Xbox 360 and the Nintento Wii for example.
IBM first introduced POWER with their RS/6000 in 1990, it was a quite expensive superscalar, high performance multi-chip design. Shortly after they started work of a less expensive single chip design. IBM approached Apple with the goal of collaborating on the development, and finally Apple brought Motorola on board (Motorola was the maker of the highly successful 680x0 processors which were used in Apple Macs, Commodore Amigas, Atari STs and even early Silicon Graphics workstations).
The first PowerPC processor was the PowerPC 601, which offered full compatibility with the existing POWER architecture (this was dropped with later generations). It was used by Apple for their new PowerMac computers, both IBM and Motorola offered PowerPC based computers, Microsoft released Windows NT 3.51 for the architecture, IBM ported AIX and announced OS/2 while Sun Microsystems ported Solaris to the new platform. Everything looked good for the PowerPC as a new desktop architecture back then, and many experts even thought this could be the end for Intel and the x86 platform (in fact the PowerPC 601 was also faster than any Intel chip at the time).
But finally IBM didn't manage to port OS/2 to the PowerPC, and in the end only Apple was successful on the market with their line of Power Macintosh computers. Support by other solution providers vanished and plans to port other OSes were cancelled. Both IBM and Motorola started to focus their PowerPC efforts onto the embedded market.
The second PowerPC generation included the low end PowerPC 603 and high end PowerPC 604. The 603 didn't perform well when running Apple's OS because the built-in cache was too small for the required 68000 code emulator, therefore Apple had to wait for the improved 603e before they could use the PowerPC in a laptop (that was the PowerBook 5300 series - I owned one of those, and I can confirm that this was probably the worst product Apple ever produced). There was a 64 bit implementation called the PowerPC 620, but Apple never used this chip as it was quite slow and expensive.
There were also rumors about a PowerPC chip with a built-in Intel x86 emulator that would allow M$ Windows emulations to run at native speed. This project, dubbed the PowerPC 615, did in fact exist as IBM developers at IBM's Essex Junction, Burlington, Vermont facility worked on it in 1993. There were even running prototypes of the chip in 1995, but the project was cancelled shortly after because of performance problems. There are also rumors that Microsoft convinced IBM to drop the development of the 615.
The third PowerPC generation (aka PowerPC 7x0 or simply G3) was based on a greatly improved version of the PowerPC 603, and the fourth generation (aka PowerPC 74xx or simply G4) by Motorola used the PowerPC 604 core design with an additional SIMD / vector unit. Motorola had massive problems with the manufacturing of the G4, and finally Intel was able to surpass the PowerPC in terms of speed and performance.
Apple was in big trouble then, and users had to wait a long time until IBM finally introduced the PowerPC 970, a 64 bit implementation using a POWER4 core (the POWER4 was a multicore design in fact) with an additional AltiVec compatible SIMD unit. It looked as if the PowerPC was finally back to the desktop, but shortly after IBM experienced the same problems as Motorola before.
In 2006 Steve Jobs finally announced that Apple would migrate to the Intel x86 platforms. It is said that nobody at IBM was informed about this move, and IBM managers responsible for the PowerPC development learned about the switch in the news.
The PowerPC remains a successful embedded and game console architecture today, and many supercomputers in the Top500 list are running PowerPC or POWER processors. But on the desktop the PowerPC is definately dead.
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