The claim that sites such as MySpace and Bebo are doing us a favor by promoting our work is disingenuous. Radio stations also promote our work, but they pay us a royalty that recognizes our contribution to their business. Why should that not apply to the Internet, too?”

Sometimes there are words that really reverberate with people. What Thomas Jefferson wrote in the preamble to the U.S. Constitution is one. I think Barack Obama’s disquisition on race in America is another. I’m curious to know how the smackdown Billy Bragg delivered to the social-networking moguls is going to be received.

Update 12:50 p.m. PDT: Over at Rough Type, Nick Carr has a good take on the topic that’s worth reading. Especially this zinger toward the end:

What’s at stake here is more than just the morality of the market. The huge social networking sites that seek to use music as free content are as much to blame for the malaise currently affecting the industry as the music lover who downloads songs for free. Both the corporations and the kids, it seems, want the use of our music without having to pay for it.

Best as I can tell, Bragg isn’t a technophobe trying to turn back the clock. Rather, he’s concerned about the livelihood of his profession and he wants to know how musicians will make a living in the cyberage.

If history’s any guide, his New York Times op-ed on Saturday called “The Royalty Scam” will fall on deaf ears. Still, it’s worth a serious hearing.

“Exploitation is exploitation, no matter how lovingly it’s wrapped in neo-hippie technobabble about virtual communities, social production, and the gift economy.”

“The musicians who posted their work on Bebo.com are no different from investors in a start-up enterprise. Their investment is the content provided for free while the site has no liquid assets. Now that the business has reaped huge benefits, surely they deserve a dividend.

To help curb spending and get the company back on track, Nortel said, it would cut 2,100 jobs. It also plans to relocate about 1,000 workers to places where wages are not as high. At the end of 2007, Nortel said it employed about 32,500 workers. The job cuts should save the company about $300 million a year, but the company said it will also take a onetime charge for the plan of about $275 million.

Recently there have been rumblings that Nortel is in talks with Motorola to combine their wireless infrastructure businesses. This could be good for both of the companies. Together they would be in a much better position to address current GSM network builds in Europe and other parts of the world where that wireless technology standard is used widely. And at the same time they could better address markets like the U.S. and South Korea, where mobile operators use CDMA technology.

Nonetheless, Mark Sue, an analyst with RBC Capital Markets, says it could be a long time before Nortel is able to turn things around.

Telecommunications equipment maker Nortel Networks said it will cut more jobs as the company’s losses widen.

Nortel is in a tight spot. The company is facing slowing demand for its traditional telephony gear. Chief Executive Officer Mike Zafirovski, who took the top spot at the company in 2005, has been trying to grow Nortel by focusing on new technologies. But it’s clear the company is struggling. Part of the problem is its balance sheet. But another big problem is that the company literally missed the boat in the 3G wireless equipment market, and as a result has only small market share here in that segment.

The company’s stock plunged some 13 percent on Wednesday to $9.96 after the company reported that its fourth-quarter earnings declined about 3.7 percent to $3.2 billion. The company reported a loss for the fourth quarter of $884 million compared to a loss of $80 million in the fourth quarter of 2006. The higher losses were due to a tax-related charge, the company said.

The company recognizes its shortcomings and has been focusing on the next generation of wireless technology, namely by developing gear using the WiMax technology. Nortel has also said it’s committed to supplying products for the competing 4G wireless technology called LTE (Long Term Evolution). But network builds using these technologies are still in their early days. In terms of WiMax, Sprint Nextel is the only major carrier in the U.S. to commit to using the technology. And its own financial troubles have called into question whether or not the network will actually get built.

Q: Is there a bit of a tragedy-of-the-commons element to crowdsourcing, to content on YouTube and things like that, where the 80-20 rule–that 80 percent of content is low-quality–governs?
Howe: There’s an antidote to the 80-20 rule, and it’s that the crowd filters itself. I just put up a blog post about Dell IdeaStorm, which is just a modern-day suggestion box.

(Credit:
Random House)

You write in the book about the success of the low-budget Web TV show, The Burg. Does that success create more opportunity for people working outside the mainstream system?

Howe: Absolutely. We’re seeing the emergence of a different kind of complex ecosystem where some shows have the very highest production values but other shows look better with lower production values, and so it just an aesthetic, and the fact that aesthetic exists means that people without a big budget can exploit that.

In 2006, Wired magazine reporter Jeff Howe published a story about a phenomenon he’d been following in which the power of large numbers of people was being harnessed to make things happen that hadn’t been possible before outside the auspices of corporations or other big institutions.

Since this meritocracy is opening up doors to everyone, how can endangered businesses like journalism save themselves?

Howe: By thinking creatively and streamlining. Journalism faces a lot of challenges. The advance of the crowd is only one of those. But smart news organizations are realizing that having their readers engaged in the media production process–in a richer, more sophisticated way–is its own end. It sells papers, it sells Web sites, it brings readers in.

If you have the talent, you can make it. This is one of the central themes of crowdsourcing: There’s a meritocracy, where people count no matter whether they have the connections or the budget or expensive equipment. And it’s everything from astronomy to science to graphic design to photography to writing.

That, maybe, was the chief differentiator of Howe’s discovery from James Surowiecki’s Wisdom of the Crowds: that far-flung people are able to achieve great things outside the box.

What are the best industries for crowdsourcing?

Howe: It has totally transformed stock photography. So the question I pose in my book is, “Is stock photography the canary in the coal mine?” We might be beginning to see this with graphic design. I don’t know yet because I haven’t done the reporting on it, but it’s at least something similar.

On Tuesday, Howe published his first book, appropriately titled, Crowdsourcing: Why the Power of the Crowd Is Driving the Future of Business. And as he prepares to storm the book world on a promotional tour, he is also giving interviews far and wide about the topic. On Tuesday alone, he writes on his blog, he will speak on 27 different radio programs around the country.

Suddenly, every corporation wants the crowd to create their own ads, and that’s often a disaster. Everyone wants to throw out a shingle and create a social-networking site.

It’s really exemplified by MDotStrange, who literally created a feature-length movie that got screened at Sundance in his little studio apartment in San Jose, using software that he’d presumably pirated and with a budget of zero dollars. It was simply labor, and that means that the game is open to anyone.

One example you talk about where a business is getting it right is the Netflix Prize, where Netflix offered $1 million to the first person who could improve his or her recommendation engine by 10 percent. What makes that your favorite problem-solving network application?

Howe: Because it got such a robust response very quickly, and it showed what brilliance was out there in the crowd. It’s got all the elements of crowdsourcing. I was only theorizing about this two years ago, so to see practice mimic theory in this case was gratifying. And it was great to the see that the contestants were collaborating with each other, despite the fact that they were helping competition.

How will crowdsourcing change in the next few years?

Howe: We’re seeing Crowdsourcing 2.0 emerge, a more intelligent form of crowdsourcing. Dell is using it intelligently. But I see a lot of the early adopters getting out of it.

He called the phenomenon “crowdsourcing,” and the term quickly caught on, joining others, like “tipping point,” “wisdom of the crowds,” “the long tail” as household phrases for the ways that things were changing all around us, often thanks to the democratizing reach of the Internet and the commoditization of tools, like high-quality digital cameras, that had previously been out of reach of most.

What diversity of experience brings is, even if someone may not be well-versed in that subject matter, she is able to apply her expertise from another subject matter entirely and say, “Well, you know, but wait, what if we try this?” And when you have a crowd, because you have the power of large numbers, there are times that taken as a whole, they excel because they are trying so many different things all at once.

He likes to talk, for example, about how a large number of people are now able to take great photographs, thanks to their high-end but relatively inexpensive cameras. This enabled a new kind of stock photography world to emerge–one that seems to be doing away with the traditional model in which only a select few photographers could have their work collected by stock photo agencies.

Jeff Howe’s new book ‘Crowdsourcing,’ explores the power of people who collectively work on projects even when they’re strangers to each other.

The essence of crowdsourcing is to take an overwhelming task, and by breaking it up into little chunks and distributing it to a large number of people, it becomes feasible. The good ideas rise like cream to the surface.

(Credit:
Daniella Zalcman)

Dell receives about 9,000 ideas, and some 500,000 people vote on them. And what those votes do is drive the best ideas up to the top. A lot of those ideas suck, but you don’t have to read them, and Dell doesn’t have to take action on them.

You talked about Gannett being one of those news organizations, right?

Howe: I think Gannett has done smart stuff. It’s the largest newspaper publisher in America, and it has made some smart community-oriented moves. But Gannett just laid off 1,000 people, so the fact that it’s engaged its readers doesn’t make it immune from market forces.

You wrote that diversity of experience trumps expertise. Why is that?

Howe: Well, these aren’t my ideas. I’m merely re-presenting what are pretty standard collective-intelligence principles. A diverse group of problem solvers will almost always beat a homogeneous group of problem solvers. The reason is, very smart people tend to come from the same institutions, and they tend to try to solve problems in the same way. And sometimes that works, but often, it doesn’t.

One of the elements of Howe’s defining crowdsourcing was a new understanding of how, when brought together to utilize collective intelligence, big, disparate groups of people working on a common task can be extraordinarily productive and deeply creative.

You have a lot of people who can do low-end design. You know they can create a logo. They can lay out a Web page, even though they’re not professionals. They’re adequate enough that they can make a supplementary income doing it or do it for fun, which is why photography works: because a lot of people love to take pictures.

And the fact is they probably don’t. So those companies will get out, or they’ll get smart. As crowdsourcing continues to penetrate the mainstream, more companies will use it, but only the smart companies will succeed at it.

Crowdsourcing is also having a big impact in corporate science, through companies such as InnoCentive and YourEncore and, you know, my suspicion is that it will continue to migrate into other fields, especially creative services.

We saw like Wal-Mart try to do this, and it created fake entries about kids who were buying Wal-Mart products. Any of us who track stuff like this thinks, “do you have no one smart in your entire organization? You’re the largest employer in the world.”

Last week, Howe and I spoke about where this crowdsourcing phenomenon fits into our world. I had hoped to ask him to spell out the differences between his book and that of Surowiecki, but before I could, he had to leave to be with his family at his home in Brooklyn, N.Y.

So there is more opportunity?

Howe: There’s enormous opportunity for amateur filmmakers with talent. The bar is no longer, “Do I have access to 16-millimeter film or enough money to get it developed?”

(Credit:
Apple)

Updated on April 27 at 8:20 a.m. PDT with additional information about DirectX 11 and correcting for Intel comments at bottom.

This is where OpenCL (Open Computing Language) comes in. OpenCL is a programming environment for “heterogeneous” computing. That is, computers using a mix of multicore CPUs and GPUs. Microsoft’s analogous programming environment is DirectX.

Apple's upcoming Mac OS X Snow Leopard will tap into the compute power of graphics processors

That said, CPUs from Intel and AMD are still indispensable. “If you’re running an unpredictable task, the CPU is the jack of all trades. It is really good at these unpredictable tasks. The GPU is a master of one task. And that is a highly parallel task.” he said.

Note: The paragraph quoting an Intel spokesman originally said “Intel agrees–generally.” This was changed to: “Intel sees it this way…”

Apple says this about OpenCL on its Web site. “Another powerful Snow Leopard technology, OpenCL…makes it possible for developers to efficiently tap the vast gigaflops of computing power currently locked up in the graphics processing unit.”

But some tasks traditionally handled by the CPU will be shifted over to the GPU–or divvied up, so certain operations are done on the CPU, while others are done on the GPU. “The really interesting thing about OpenCL and DirectX is that OpenCL is going to form part of the Apple operating system (Snow Leopard) and DirectX (version 11) will form part of Windows 7,” said Gupta. “And what that essentially means to consumers is, if your laptop has an Nvidia GPU or ATI (AMD) GPU, it will run the operating system faster because the operating system will essentially see two processors in the system. For the first time, the operating system is going to see the GPU both as a graphics chip and as a compute engine,” he said.

In an interview Friday with Sumit Gupta, product manager for Nvidia’s Tesla products, Gupta described how new programming environments will tap into the latent compute horsepower of graphics processors to accelerate software in Apple’s upcoming
OS X Snow Leopard and Microsoft’s
Windows 7 operating systems.

Graphics chips will be tapped to accelerate more tasks in upcoming versions of Apple’s and Microsoft’s operating systems, according to Nvidia.

Gupta continued. “If you look at the Apple OS today. It’s a beautiful interface where there actually is more visual content than there is sequential (CPU) content…stuff that’s more available to the GPU. The CPU is one aspect but not necessarily the most important aspect anymore,” he said.

“For example, when you launch (Google) Picasa, that is completely run on the CPU. (But) the minute you choose an image and apply a filter, that filter should run on the GPU. (This happens) when you have Apple and Microsoft pushing the application developers to do that,” Gupta said.

(Note: Gupta’s comments implied future versions of DirectX, not DirectX generically.)

Today, on a PC or a Mac, the CPUs made by Intel and Advanced Micro Devices are adept at handling general operating system tasks. For instance, handling the sequence of things that must happen after the user clicks on an icon to start an application on their desktop.

One of the limiting factors of unlocking the potential of the GPU has been the programming environment. “The hardest part about using the GPU was that you had to use a graphics language to program it,” Gupta said. This is changing, however, with OpenCL and Nvidia’s CUDA development environment based on the C programming language.

“Coming out with this C compiler and the CUDA architecture, that’s the big change we made. We came up with an architecture that was more friendly and familiar to your average C programmer,” Gupta added.

Graphics chips aren’t just for games anymore. The trend toward general-purpose graphics processing is defined by an acronym that doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue: GPGPU. But the essence of General Purpose computing on Graphics Processing Units is pretty simple: use the scores–or even hundreds in higher-end chips–of processing cores inside GPUs to speed tasks that, in some cases, would be done much less efficiently by the central processing unit (CPU).

(Credit:
Steve Guttenberg)

Point is, it’s easy to talk about quality, but without the desire to follow through, it’s just talk. Most of the HDTVs I see at major manufacturers showrooms in New York City are horribly out of whack. It’s the rarest sight, seeing a well setup TV, so it’s no wonder most people get it wrong. It’s easier to just sell the latest and greatest new tech, and whatever the consumer experiences, well, they’re on their own.

OK, it was a bar, but I remember that at one of last year’s TV manufacturer line shows, they had commissioned a famous photographer to do high-rez portraits of movie stars, and despite all the hype about how much they cared about quality and resolution, the hosts proceeded to show a room full of consumer electronics journalists a parade of bloated faces. Right, every single one displayed incorrectly. I sat there squirming in my seat.

Of course, audio is in even worse shape. Good quality sound is harder to find, but only handful of audiophiles would ever claim to care about sound. Good enough audio is good enough for everyone else.

Intel Core 2 Quad processor

The price of the Core 2 Quad Q6700 (2.66GHz) fell 50 percent from $530 to $266, while the quad-core Xeon X3230 (2.66GHz) saw an identical cut: from $530 to $266.

The dual-core Xeon 3085 (3GHz) was reduced 29 percent from $266 to $188, and the Intel Core 2 Duo E6850 (3GHz), from $266 to $183, or 31 percent.

The chipmaker introduced the dual-core Celeron E1400 (2GHz) at a price of $53 and Celeron 570 (2.66GHz) at $134.

Celeron price-cut highlights include the Celeron 430 (1.8GHz), reduced 23 percent from $44 to $34 and the dual-core Celeron E1200 (1.6GHz), falling 19 percent from $53 to $43.

(Credit:
Intel)

Pentium dual-core chips saw price drops too: The E2200 (2.2GHz) and E2180 (2GHz) were cut 12 percent and 14 percent to $74 and $64, respectively.

Intel posted price cuts on Sunday that included reductions of 50 percent on select quad-core processors. The chipmaker also introduced new Celeron and Core 2 Duo processor models.

(Credit:
CNET News.com)

I gave up on that quixotic quest, and in retrospect it was the right decision. Sam Ramji, Bill Hilf, and others are doing a far better job of nudging Microsoft toward open source than I would have. But the bigger reason is that Microsoft has placed an apparently insurmountable hurdle in its path to fully engaging the open-source community, and to my ability to fully support its embrace of open source:

Notice how few open-source partnerships it has announced since its declaration that Linux violates its patents? It signs with also-ran Linux desktop vendors and skittish Asian OEMs, but not with the mainstream open-source startups that are taking open source into the enterprise. It used to sign these partners. Not anymore.

We’re to the point that many commercial open-source companies are making it acceptable to integrate proprietary and open-source licensing into their business models. This means you can, too, without giving up your proprietary revenue stream. So why not engage?

I suspect that had Microsoft gone public with its patent crusade before it did deals with Zend, SugarCRM, MySQL, JBoss, etc., it might have netted fewer of these deals, too, because it pollutes the open-source partnerships it touches. It makes everything look like a patent pledge, rather than the interoperability agreements that these companies signed up to complete.

commentary

Why, Microsoft? Why not act like every other software company in the industry today and engage open source on fair and equal terms? Why not stop this silly attempt to box open source in rather than letting it help you build your business?

Several years ago while still working for Novell, I considered going to work for Microsoft in Europe. (Had I waited long enough, I could have worked for Microsoft while still at Novell, but that’s another story, albeit one that is paying off well for Novell.) I thought I could help the company figure out open source and navigate the thorny issues that prevent it from embracing open source.

It’s unclear to me why Microsoft refuses to back off this issue. It stands alone in its dogmatic insistence on fouling the open-source downstream.

Microsoft’s solo crusade against open source through patents baffles me. It also prevents me from working for them or with them. I’m not alone in this.

Patents.

How long will you keep this going?

Masnick: We don’t know yet. We launched it and said let’s see. One of the things we’ve been doing is running one-off promotions. We may keep doing that. We’ll start shutting some of the tiers down and replacing them with new tiers. We’ll do that for a while and see what happens.

Are you profitable?

Masnick: We are profitable. The project itself has definitely been profitable. We didn’t want to set too high of expectations ourselves, we kind of wanted to see where it was going. Some of our basic assumptions we’ve learned were wrong but in a good way. We sort of naturally expected that least expensive levels would be the top sellers. That hasn’t been true. To date, the top seller has been the package called the Approaching Infinity Package, which is a book based on a series of Techdirt posts about understanding the economics and business models. We took those posts and expanded on it a little more. People are buying that package, which also comes with a T-shirt. It is our best seller so far.

Do you consider yourself a journalist, entrepreneur…?

Masnick: Well, there is a lot more to the company beyond the blog. It’s not just me. We have eight full-time employees. The part that really pays the bills is the Insight Community. What we did is basically build up the community around Techdirt and have set it up so companies can tap into that community to generate insightful conversations, either for internal purposes–things like market research–or for external purposes such as branding.

Mike Masnick thinks alternative business models for the music, film, and publishing sectors are out there. He wants to help find them.

Techdirt has begun experimenting with whether a content owner, such as himself, can generate meaningful revenue while giving away his main product. Instead of charging for his posts, Masnick offers fans a range of other items or services to purchase, such as a Techdirt T-shirt, spending a day with Masnick, or access to his stories before they’re posted.

It kind of grew from there.

Masnick is the firey commentator who blasts copyright owners and anyone else he believes has failed to accept that in the Digital Age most of the control now rests with consumers. He strongly maintains, however, that there are still ways for entertainers, artists, and journalists to make money. They just have to be developed. Plenty of people disagree with him of course.

We didn’t expect it to be our business model but we thought that we could learn something from it and understand the different issues that musicians have to go through and the media must go through in terms of experimenting with different business models and let’s see what happens. That was the basic plan. We sort of took the Josh Freese and the Jill Sobule models as kind of the inspiration in terms of how we designed it. We set up tiers. I don’t remember how many. I think it was 11 different ways that people could support us and get something of value back. We wanted to be clear that this isn’t the NPR- or PBS-type model where we are begging for support. We want to make sure people are getting something of real value back. We wanted to make it fun, and cool.

Heaping criticism and scorn on media companies has worked well for Mike Masnick, operator of the popular blog Techdirt.

So they really were focusing on connecting with fans in an interesting way but also offering different tiers of options so people can buy at different types of levels. We’ve seen that happen and we started to wonder what would happen if you applied that model to a publication rather than just the music business. We said ‘Let’s experiment with that. We’ve been calling it Connect With Fans, and Reason to Buy.

We finally came up with this idea where Jill is going to take some notebooks and write out some lyrics by hand and then some doodles and drawings using up the first few pages of the notebook. And so for the people who buy the Music Club, they get a unique one-of-a-kind, hand-drawn notebook from Jill and also a signed copy of her CD. Some of the other artists, one of them created a CD that’s just for this package that includes some tracks he’s released before but also never-before-released tracks. (Note: most of the items Masnick referred to here were included in a $150 package called Techdirt Music Club. It has since sold out).

Over the past couple of years, the free model has drawn a lot of attention. For instance, Radiohead and Nine Inch Nails stirred a lot of fanfare with their attempts at music giveaways.

Still, there’s no denying that his brand of criticism has resonated with the growing number of techies, bloggers, and file sharers who believe art, news, and entertainment should be free. What separates Masnick, 34, from other notable old-media critics is that he isn’t satisfied with just slamming music labels or Hollywood studios for failing to find alternative business models. He’s gone looking for them himself.

In an interview with CNET News, Masnick spoke about his tests at finding a new publishing paradigm, copyright fights, and rage.

Why are you so full of rage? You seem to think that the content owners are sticking their head in the sand. That also appears to really tick you off?
Masnick: I try to not think of it as rage. It’s kind of funny, I actually think of myself as optimistic.

Tell me about what you’re doing with your experiments.
Masnick: Obviously, I’d been following what the different musicians have been doing and writing about it on the blog and talking about it at the various conferences, and we wanted to find how the different models were working and what’s cool about them. The ones that we’ve liked and we’ve noticed are things like what Trent Reznor is doing but also what Josh Freese, and Jill Sobule, and some others have done with sort of setting up tiers of options.

(Credit:
Dennis Yang)

As part of that, we got some different authors and musicians to take part as well. (One) of the different options is the Techdirt Book Club, which includes some books that we really like that really talk about these different issues, with all of the authors offering up signed copies. And the Music Club is four different musicians all agreeing to offer up something unique, that you can’t get anywhere else. In some cases it’s a signed book or CD.

What’s interesting here, we’ve done a couple of reader surveys and stuff and the readers are sort of bi-modal. There is definitely a group of younger, late-teen, early 20s reader and another crew that’s late 30s and early 40s. Those are the two high points. There certainly are a bunch of IT folks, and a lot of media folks, and a lot of policy and government people. We get a fair number of readers from the Washington, D.C. area. We get lawyers, a lot of patent lawyers like to get upset about what I say about the patent system. It’s a broad mix because we don’t get that deep into the tech aspect of it. Slash-dot is a heavy techie audience.

I recognize that there is always some controversy whenever we discuss these things, but I try to focus on some of the economics of it. That comes from my background and my business school training and the economics professors in school who got me thinking about this stuff. If you understand the economics you start to see it as inevitable. The idea of trying to hold back against it seems kind of silly. When you recognize the basic economic principals, then you realize there are a lot of opportunities there.

Who is your reader? Tell me about him or her?

Masnick: It is mostly him. There are definitely female readers and some active as well, but there is definitely a majority of male readers. It’s a pretty broad mix. Most are from the U.S. We have a pretty decent-sized audience. We do have a pretty good international following, especially in English-speaking countries; Canada New Zealand, England. In the U.S., we’re pretty spread out. A lot of our following is not Silicon Valley-based. We’re not considered, I don’t think, as a Silicon Valley blog. It’s due partly because we don’t talk about the latest start-ups. We talk more about economics and policy and lot of things that touch on different areas. We have less of a focus on the Silicon Valley scene even though we’re based here.

“Some of our basic assumptions we’ve learned were wrong but in a good way. We sort of naturally expected that least expensive levels would be the top sellers. That hasn’t been true.” –Mike Masnick, Techdirt

What made you attempt this?

Masnick: Partly it was to get the experience. It’s an experiment and we wanted to see what happens. At times people would complain “Oh, you can’t talk about any of this stuff because you’re not doing any of it.” We said “OK, let’s see what happens. Let’s find out what we learn.” It’s a little bit different than being a musician but we figure there’s always going to be something you can learn from it.

Q: Do you see yourself as the spokesman for the free content or anti-copyright crowd?
Mike Masnick: I don’t think so. I might take a slightly different perspective on some of these things than some of those folks. There are a lot of voices in this discussion. I think I’m one of the voices and I certainly do have an audience. But I try as much as I can to focus the discussions more on the business side of it and where the opportunities are.

“Milliwatts” refers to chips such as Atom, a tiny low-power, low-cost processor destined for ultramobile devices and low-cost desktops typically running either Linux or Windows XP. The first Atom chips will launch in June.

Click here for more stories on IDF Shanghai.

Nehalem boasts increased parallelism, better branch prediction (to move instructions more quickly through the instruction pipeline), and an on-chip memory controller for increased memory performance–what Intel calls “memory latency reduction.” Something, by the way, Advanced Micro Devices already has in its chips.

There is also a demonstration of wireless device discovery and setup. This demonstration shows how to detect and connect to nearby wireless displays, using the familiar FnF7 (Function F7 key combination).

(Credit:
Intel)

(See: Intel rolls out five new Atom processors.)

“Petaflops” refers to high-performance computing–what used to be called supercomputing. (”Peta” is quadrillion, or a thousand trillion; “flop” is floating-point operation.) Intel is targeting petaflop supercomputers that would compete with the fastest supercomputer in the world: IBM’s Blue Gene/P machines.

The specs for Intel’s Dunnington processor

The chip buzzwords are: Tukwila, a new quad-core chip with 2 billion transistors, a whopping 30MB of cache, and a new interconnect technology called QuickPath; Dunnington, a six-core chip for multiprocessor computers that can support four or more processors (in this case, each with six cores); Nehalem, a follow-on to the current “Penryn” processors, it is a new 45-nanometer chip microarchitecture due in the fourth quarter that scales up to eight cores; and Larrabee, a visual-computing architecture that uses many cores (”many” usually means many more than a typical quad-core computer).

In addition to Atom, the processor spotlight will likely fall on Nehalem and Larrabee. Nehalem is a relatively known quantity; Larrabee, a relatively unknown quantity. So interest should focus on the latter.

Larrabee is a graphics processor scheduled for the 2009-2010 time frame. It will include a new vector instruction set to improve the performance of graphics and video applications. Larrabee will be compatible with Intel’s popular x86 instruction set, theoretically making life easier for software developers.

The main theme for the event, which starts Wednesday, Beijing time, refers to “very, very big to very, very small and low power,” according to Pat Gelsinger, senior vice president and co-general manager of Intel’s digital enterprise group, speaking in a video.

On a slightly more practical level, the Cliffside technology is being demonstrated from the Mobile Products Group; it enables a single Wi-Fi adapter to function like two independent Wi-Fi adapters. The hope is that this technology could sync your MP3 and video files without a USB cable, directly and wirelessly connecting your notebook to your TV to view HD movies. More here.

On another front, Intel is evangelizing universal connectivity, always a problematic proposition, simply because it invariably promises more (sometimes much more) than it can deliver. Intel puts it this way: “Imagine a day when a single device small enough to fit in your pocket…knows your tendencies and preferences and can adapt and optimize its interfaces to match what you are doing at any point any time…Imagine a day when this device…can dynamically become a hybrid combination of other computing and multimedia devices in close proximity.” You get the picture. Intel calls this “Carry Small, Live Large.”

While the marquee processor theme at IDF Shanghai is “milliwatts to petaflops,” Intel is also set to offer a vision of universal connectivity.

Auditors found that the State Department had lost track of about $30 million worth of equipment, most of it laptops, the initial Congressional Quarterly report says.

Updated 11:10 a.m. PST Thursday May 8 with information that laptops were located

News of the missing laptops first surfaced in late March in an anonymous post on the Dead Men Working blog written by foreign service officers.

Given the sensitive and often secret nature of data the State Department workers deal with, officials had been bracing for repercussions like congressional hearings, according to CQ. That’s what happened when a Veterans Administration official had a laptop stolen in 2006, IRS laptops went missing in 2001, and a State Department laptop containing the names of foreign agents working for the U.S. government was stolen in 1999.