The magazine of the Melbourne PC User Group Editorial Ash Nallawalla ash@melbpc.org.au |
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Hooray for us! That cheer originated from our very own Tom Coleman many years ago and it is time to dust it off and use it again. I am referring, of course, to today's announcement that PC Update has won the Best Newsletter award in the APCUG Large User Groups category. On behalf of our members and the Committee, I would like to offer congratulations to our numerous contributors in the July issue, which was the one submitted for judging. Equal praise, if not more, is deserved by Gary Taig, without whose energy and dedication we might not have won that award.
APCUG at Comdex
Yes, I am at Fall Comdex in Las Vegas as I write this (15 November), with our new President Dave Botherway and Groups Coordinator, Bill Dair. It is only the first day of the Association of Personal Computer User Groups (APCUG) user group conference and we are attending different "roundtables". There is a list of them at the APCUG Web site: http://www.apcug.org.
I have not been to the past three APCUG conferences or served on the APCUG Board of Directors since 1999. As I have better control over my own time now, I ran for and won a seat on the Board for 2004-2006.
From several accounts, the Comdex computer show appears to be on its last legs (it opens in two days' time), with registration numbers expected to be around 50,000 people, down from the unimpressive 80,000 last year. If Comdex is no more, APCUG is expected to run its conference in the same time frame, although some member groups are calling for it to move to January, to coincide with the Consumer Electronics Show (CES). Vendor and visitor participation at CES is somewhat akin to the heady old 1990s of Comdex.
Intel
Intel announced its next generation processor, code named Dothan, which contains 140 million transistors (only 77 million in the Pentium 4). It features enhanced register data retrieval, an enhanced prefetcher and a 2 MB, power-efficient L2 cache. If I sound as though I know what that means, I don't. Like CPUs before it, the Dothan will give us another excuse to upgrade our PCs.
What I do understand is that these chips are made from silicon, which needs to become thinner to accommodate more power. In 1990, Intel's famed Andy Grove talked about how the thickness of silicon will ultimately reach a point where it can't get any thinner. This concept was called "Silicon 2000", presumably after the year when the limit would be reached. It is now the end of 2003 and that limit has not yet been reached.
The Pentium 4 presently is 130 nanometres (nm) thick and has a 70 nm gate. The Dothan will be 90 nm with a 50 nm gate. By way of comparison, the influenza virus is about 100 nm thick.
Intel first entered the portable computing market with its 386SL chip in 1993. Today its Centrino chips provide wireless (WiFi) power to notebooks. It predicts that handheld computers will soon deliver the power we see on today's notebooks. A curious statistic that surprised me is that the Asia-Pacific region apparently has more wireless hotspots than the rest of the world combined.
The Economy
I spent three weeks on a client assignment in San Francisco a few days before leaving for the Comdex trip. I had a rental car and used my free time to revisit my old haunts in Silicon Valley, some 50 km south. The traffic on the interstate 101 freeway was not as bad as I remembered it, which means that there are fewer cars on the road.
Several news outlets have been talking up the state of the economy, particularly as it applies to jobs. Three of my American colleagues all found new jobs while I was here, one of them after an 18-month unemployment stretch.
A month ago, I spent two weeks in Mumbai, India, the birthplace I had not seen for 20 years. I met some Indians who had returned unemployed from the United States, only to find new employment working at a fifth of their US salary. Not surprisingly, they are working in the "Business Process Outsourcing" (BPO) industry for a remote US master. BPO goes beyond the more common out-sourcing of the call centre or data entry - it includes many low-level business processes, credit approval, for example. This industry is loathed by many people in the West, but seems to be an inevitable outcome of globalisation.
The news reports agree on one thing - the economy is not booming but it is certainly improving. Let us hope that this is also our experience at home and I wish you and your families a very happy festive season.
Reprinted from the December 2003 issue of PC Update, the magazine of Melbourne PC User Group, Australia
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