Small linux distros

News Digest 21-Nov-2002: Doomed Distros

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Nanotech Seen Enabling Steady Semiconductor Growth

Nanotechnology will catapult the semiconductor industry into a new phase of relatively steady, sustained growth that will replace its historical boom-and-bust cycles, microprocessor veteran Nick Tredennick said. Just as the increased circuit complexity posited by Moore's Law enabled the PC and its derivatives, nanotechnologies will enable ever more diverse embedded applications that will outnumber those spawned by the PC, he said. Tredennick considers the introduction of the microprocessor some 40 years ago as having enslaved hardware design to the instruction set that is the underpinning of that device.

Read the full story on: EE Times

Need For Modeling Tools Rises With Design Complexity

Over the years, a highly popular feature at the annual Embedded Systems Conference has been classes on advanced system modeling tools. The reason for their continuing popularity is simply that there has always been a core group of designers involved in projects at the leading edges of embedded design. Because of the complexity of the system they are working on, the size of the code or the need to ensure reliability, these designers needed the capacity of such tools to accurately model complex systems and all the interrelationships among diverse processing elements, software processes and physical interfaces.

Read the full story on: EE Times

National Semiconductor to Supply Chips for Microsoft Smart Personal Objects

Microsoft and National Semiconductor announced a relationship to develop a chipset for Microsoft's new Smart Personal Objects Technology (SPOT) initiative. The chipset, comprising a receiver and CPU and related Microsoft software will power an array of Smart Personal Objects, such as clocks, pens, key-chains and billfolds, capable of receiving Web-based information such as weather reports, stock quotes and sports scores. Developers in Microsoft Research's SPOT group have worked with NS for more than two years to plan, design and build this chipset.

Read the full story on: DigiTimes

Motorola Grooms Successor to Floating-Gate Flash

Motorola Inc.'s Semiconductor Products Sector is readying a Sonos-type embedded non-volatile memory, a successor to conventional floating-gate flash, that will begin sampling as early as the first quarter of 2004. Sonos stands for the material stack, silicon-oxide-nitride-oxide-silicon, with memory bits stored in the nitride layer directly beneath a polysilicon gate. Sonos non-volatile memory eventually will replace floating-gate flash because scaling the oxide gate dielectric in floating-gate devices has reached practical limits, and high-k dielectrics leak too much current, said Ko-Min Chang, manager of device development and process integration at Motorola's embedded-memory center.

Read the full story on: EE Times

Maxell Shows Small, High-Capacity Discs

Maxell is showing at Comdex a host of new DVD and CD media, and promising such advances as smaller and double-sided DVD-R discs, plus discs suited to today's faster drives. Come February, Maxell will release 3-inch, 2X Mini DVD-R discs that will let you easily carry 1.4GB in a shirt pocket. You should be able to write on these with any DVD-RW/-R drives, and read them with any DVD-ROM drive or living room DVD player that can read standard-size DVD-Rs.

Read the full story on: Yahoo! News

Fire Devastates Dutch Internet Hub

A fire at the University of Twente in the Netherlands today has destroyed one of the fastest computer networks in Europe. The fire, the cause of which is currently unknown, has gutted a building housing the vast majority of the University's computer servers and networking equipment. Twente University is known to have one of the fastest networks and internet gateways of Europe. It runs on a 9.6 Gbps backbone.

Read the full story on: The Register

Sharp Introduces World's First PDA with VGA Resolution System LCD

On November 12, Sharp introduced a new Zaurus PDA, code-named SL-C700 and equipped with a 3.7-inch, 65,536-color, transmissive system LCD of VGA (640×480-pixel) resolution and a QWERTY keyboard. The SL-C700, which uses a Linux OS, is equipped with an Intel XScale processor, 64MB flash memory, 32MB SDRAM and Secure Digital (SD) and CompactFlash (CF) card slots. Sharp plans to market the product at a suggested retail price of US$502 in Japan on December 14.

Read the full story on: DigiTimes

Analysis: The Next Linux Casualty

We're seeing an explosion in the number of Linux distributions meant specifically for desktop users, and not all of them are going to survive. One prediction: At least one of the companies now struggling to capture a significant share of the desktop Linux market will either go out of business or stop emphasizing its user-level desktop offering by the end of 2003.

Read the full story on: NewsForge

Fastest Geek Crowned At Comdex

At Comdex, ExtremeTech challenged 32 potential geeks to build a system in the shortest time possible.

Read the full story on: ExtremeTech