But not in New Zealand.

Instead, Telecom's spending the money in Australia, to buy Powertel.

Powertel is a "wholesale telco" that amongst other things provides ADSL2+. Telecom's keen to get that technology to supply customers in Australia with it, through it's subsidiary AAPT.

Wonder when we'll see ADSL2+ in New Zealand then? Theresa Gattung promised it'd be here by June last year, but apart from a few trial sites, there's no sign of it.

Posted by Juha Saarinen at 6:17 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

What's tiny already and getting smaller and smaller?

No, not your mate sitting in a tree playing with a cheese grater, but transistors in integrated circuits. Do you remember when 90 nanometre fabrication technology for processors was considered an amazing feat of "micro engineering"? Sure you do - I can't be the only one fascinated by these things... anyway, now we're down to half that size, 45nm, as Intel announced that it has working Core 2 and Xeon processors made with tiny little transistors.

How small? Here's a picture of a 45nm transistor, taken with an electron microscope I believe:

The little white dots are individual atoms. By adding metal gates and a dielectric layer with Hafnium, Intel's been able to keep up with Moore's Law. The chip giant built SRAM parts last year with 45nm technology, and this year will see the release of the Penryn code-named processors, with 410 million transistors for the dual-core variant, and 820 million for the quad-core ones.

Most of the transistors will go on increased caches, interestingly enough. The 45nm technology should allow for higher clock speeds than is currently possible with 65nm parts however, and the smaller fabrication process promises higher performance by default - as well as lower power consumption.

How small can transistors become? That remains to be seen, but Intel promises 32nm in 2009 and 22nm in 2011. Be interesting to see how to solve the problem of creating light beams that are narrow enough to use on the masks for such fine processes.

I leave you with some 45nm Trivia, courtesy of Intel:

There are 1 billion nanometres (nm) in one metre. A metre is approximately 3 feet.

The original transistor built by Bell Labs in 1947 could be held in your hand, while hundreds of Intel’s new 45nm transistor can fit on the surface of a single red blood cell.

If a house shrunk at the same pace transistors have, you would not be able to see a house without a microscope. To see the 45nm transistor, you need a very advanced microscope.

The price of a transistor in one of Intel’s forthcoming next-generation processors - codenamed Penryn - will be about 1 millionth the average price of a transistor in 1968. If car prices had fallen at the same rate, a new car today would cost about 1 cent.

You could fit more than 2,000 45nm transistors across the width of a human hair.

You could fit more than 30,000 45nm transistors onto the head of a pin, which measures approximately 1.5 million nm.

More than 2,000 45nm transistors could fit on the period (estimated to be approximately 0.1 millimetres or 100,000nm in diameter) at the end of this sentence.

A 45nm transistor can switch on and off approximately 300 billion times a second. A beam of light travels less than a tenth of an inch during the time it takes a 45nm transistor to switch on and off.

45nm Size Comparison

o A nail = 20 million nm
o A human hair = 90,000nm
o Ragweed pollen = 20,000nm
o Bacteria = 2,000nm
o Intel 45nm transistor = 45nm
o Rhinovirus = 20nm
o Silicon atom = 0.24nm

Posted by Juha Saarinen at 11:50 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Ubuntu shows some good thinking here...

No screenshots yet that I can find, and details are a little sparse, but a multimedia Linux distribution is a great idea. Check out the wiki at the Ubuntu Studio site.

Posted by Juha Saarinen at 11:14 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

"The reason we got into Xbox was not just for gaming," he [Gates] said. "It's a general purpose computer."

Brian Crecente at Kotaku got a something of a scoop with his recent Bill Gates interview, I think. In the story, Gates talks about the wildly successful Xbox 360 which has sold in huge numbers - something like ten and a half million consoles with five million Xbox Live subscriptions on top.

The Xbox 360 is able to do an awful lot for a gaming console, isn't it? Think about it: wouldn't an Xbox 360 be all the computer most people ever need? It's nice to have the openness of a PC and be able to install hardware and software on it - or even a non-Microsoft operating system.

However, many people couldn't care less about geeky things like that. They want something that's simple to use, secure, looks good and is fun to use. And cheap, too. Your average PC doesn't deliver on any of those, but an Xbox 360 does (although it's missing that magic Wii controller...)

With software as a subscription, you don't need to install anything on a computer any more. Just use a browser. Storage? Well, you've got broadband, so store broadband at an online repository somewhere, or burn it to an optical disc as a back up.

Microsoft would love it if the Xbox became the Standard Home Computer as well. It would control the hardware and the software, and incur far less in support costs. Development costs would likely be lower too, thanks to the closed nature of the platform.

The Xbox isn't quite ready to take over as a general-purpose computer, but I can I see it ending up as that pretty soon. Actually, I'm way slow to think that... Ben Heck built an Xbox360 laptop last year already. :)

Posted by Juha Saarinen at 4:18 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

As heralded in Cunliffe's stocktake announcement this year, the government today put in motion the review of the Telecommunications Obligations Service or TSO.

The reason we have "free local calls" which should really be called un-metered local calls is the TSO, a piece of legislation that subsumed the Kiwi Share agreement between the government and Telecom.

Every year, a certain amount of "TSO tax" is levied from each telco in New Zealand, based on its turnover. It's a lot of money too, and charged retrospectively since 2001. Last year, Vodafone got stung for $13.5 million for instance.

That money is payable to Telecom, to compensate for so-called unprofitable customers. These are worked out by Telecom at first, with the Commerce Commission adjusting them afterwards.

Here's the rub in the TSO scheme: the more successful you are competing against Telecom, the more you will pay.... to Telecom. And no, it cannot be revealed who the unprofitable customers are and Telecom refuses to give them up as well to other providers.

The above could all change with the review of the TSO though. Now the unprofitable customers become "constestable" and multiple providers would be allowed to compete to supply them. This means wireless operators could step in with for instance WiMAX or cellular technologies which may be cheaper to deploy than wired phone lines - which in either case cannot economically supply broadband over the greater distances required in rural areas unless fibre-optic cabling is being used.

Cheaper, Voice over IP technology will also be taken into account by the review but its two corner stones, free local calls and dial-up Internet access, remain.

Rural broadband is the another issue that the government's keen on, and it's conceivably one of the triggers behind the review. Late 2005, Telecom spat the dummy when the Commerce Commission granted TelstraClear regulated Unbundled Bitstream Service that was unconstrained in the downstream direction (but still had the 128kbit/s choke on the upstream).

Then manager of government and industry relations Bruce Parkes wrote to the Commerce Commission and said Telecom had decided to cease investment in DSLAMs for rural and provincial areas, citing the regulatory decision. As you can imagine, such a decision will not have sat well with the government.

A review of the TSO would've been necessary even without Telecom pulling investment in rural areas however. The new regulation that enforces an operational separation of Telecom's business means the TSO needs to be updated, to work with that model.

The TSO has been called an unfair subsidy for Telecom and a tax on other telcos trying to compete. Here's hoping the review will sort out some of those issues while maintaining the government's goals for society and the economy.

Posted by Juha Saarinen at 11:26 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

"We call them craplets," the official said. The term is a contraction of the words "crap" and "applet." An applet is a small computer program or application.

Still struggling to get everything running on Vista here. Firefox 2.x and Thunderbird 1.5.x/2.x betas are not working, without any useful indication as to why.

Not sure if I'd call either "craplets" but I was amused to read Saleem Khan's story on CBC Canada about Microsoft despairing over poor code polluting vista.

The story appears to mix up drivers and general application incompatibility, but Microsoft does have a point... up to a point that is. I'm finding that MS apps like Outlook 2007 and Internet Explorer 7 also crash on Vista whereas they're absolutely fine on XP. On the same dual-boot machine even.

Roll on Vista SP1...

Posted by Juha Saarinen at 4:50 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)