As the drums roll for the release of Intel's Pentium III [www.intel.com], and privacy campaigners head for the courts, there's more bad news for the chip giant.
In January AMD's K6 family of chips outsold all Intel-based desktop PC's. For the first time ever, Intel is No.2 in the
US.
Advanced Micro Devices [www.amd.com], which last year outflanked Intel's Celeron to capture the low end of the market, is heading for the stratosphere in 1999. The sub-$US1000 machine accounted for more than 65% of increasing [up 22%] US new computer sales at the start of the year.
Unseen, ubiquitous, the silicon chip is largely responsible for America's current economic boom - and may also trigger its bust.
Because at the end of the year, there's a fair chance that these secretive little gizmos will come out of hiding and sting the century to death. The toaster's revenge…
But wait! With less than 300 days to go, help has arrived from the man who at age 12 solved the riddle of Rubik's Cube, and with the publication of You Can Do The Cube became a teenage tycoon.
Patrick Bossert, now technical director of WST Business Technology, has developed the breakthrough Delta-T probe [www.embedded-science.com] that can work out which of the outdated microchips lurking in the depths of everything from fire systems to jetliners is liable to a fit of absent-mindedness come midnight December 31st.
Put simply, Delta-T attaches clips to the back of the suspect chip, determines if it contains time/date information, then captures the relevant code for diagnosis and repair.
British Airways and Sainsbury's have already successfully deployed the device, so maybe it's not too late for the hope-for-the-best brigade to follow the lead of the prudent management at Sanyo…
In every sense, then, there's more to a microchip than meets the eye. Michael Davidson, Florida State University's director of optical microscopy, was taking microphotographs of one when he suddenly spotted the smiling face of Waldo ["Where's Waldo?] beaming at him from the intricate circuitry.
"At first… I wondered if he was there to perform a special function on the chip," Davidson says.
But no. Any blank surface, from the wall of a cave to the side of a bus-stop, seems to cry out for decoration. Waldo was merely the first discovered work in a hidden exhibition of minuscule art that has been secretly created by chip designers since the dawn of the modern computer age.
View some of it at Molecular Expressions
[http://micro.magnet.fsu.edu/creatures/index.html], Davidson's chip-art site. There's an interactive Java tutorial of how this silicon doodling - each image is less than the width of a human hair - is done.
Humming-birds, cheetahs, cartoons - even Anubis, the jackal-headed Egyptian god of entombment, standing guard over mask-alignment targets - these twentieth-century cave-drawings will doubtless intrigue and mystify archaeologists of some unimaginably distant future.
And so, in the electronic age, we circle back towards our ancestors. We are truly a microchip off the old block. I found a tiny herd of bison, and was reminded of images in the recently discovered Chauvet cave [www.culture.fr/culture/arcnat/chauvet/fr/gvpda-d.htm], a subterranean Louvre over 30,000 years old
Where the works of the past-masters were created in the flicker of firelight on rock, ours take shape in the unearthly glow of a monitor.
Vita brevis, ars longa... only the lighting is different.
BookMarks
Most Prudent: FinTel
It was only a matter of time. New Zealand's first online insurance comes onstream with a simple interactive quote system for cars, travel, home and contents insurance. Tower must have special SWAT teams ready to pounce - they promise a 15-minute response time to online queries.
Advisory: life suddenly gets easier…
www.fintel.co.nz
Most Obsolete: Dead Media Project
Whatever happened to Gould's 3D television? This site remains at yesterday's cutting-edge - like so much else, ancient Athens pioneered IT with its kleroteria, Flintstonian machines for selecting jurors. ToddAO, camera obscura, the slide-rule, and that cellphone of yesteryear, the pigeon-post -indeed, getting the mail through seems to inspire our greatest ingenuity, as in Missile Mail, a visionary 1959 technology for which the US Postal Service borrowed one of the Pentagon's submarines [like the pigeons, the missiles had little sense of direction].
My favourite: the Flame Organ of the late 1700's, which exploited the ability of heated glass to utter a note - in fact, the flames still sing in Japan, where the Tokyo Gas Co. [www.tokyo-gas.co.jp] gives regular recitals on a reconstructed model [do not try this at home].
Advisory: don't even ask about the Cat-Piano…
www.islandnet.com/~ianc/dm/dm.html
Most Intelligent: Reith Lectures 1999: Runaway World
If you're among those who grizzle to the editor of the Listener about the decline of broadcasting standards, dry your tears. The flag of culture still flutters bravely at the masthead of the BBC, where Professor Anthony Giddens of the London School of Economics is about to deliver the latest in the distinguished series begun by the late Lord Reith. His theme is something you're probably furious about already - globalisation.
Advisory: the Undead Media Project…
http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/static/events/reith_99
Comments: petersinclair@email.com
Peter Sinclair: Revenge of the silicon chip as century dawns
As the drums roll for the release of Intel's Pentium III [www.intel.com], and privacy campaigners head for the courts, there's more bad news for the chip giant.
In January AMD's K6 family of chips outsold all Intel-based desktop PC's. For the first time ever, Intel is No.2 in the
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