Moore's Law has decades left, Intel CTO predicts

Moore's Law will keep going strong for decades, Intel CTO Justin Rattner predicts. Predictions of the demise of Moore's Law are routinely heard in the IT world, and some organizations are trying to find a replacement for silicon chip technology. Why we're hard-wired to ignore Moore's LawRead the Intel CTO's take on why machines could ultimately match human intelligence Moore's Law, in force for more than 40 years, says that the number of transistors that can be placed on an integrated circuit will double every 18 to 24 months.

But Rattner says that silicon has plenty of life left and said there is no end in sight for Moore's Law. "If Moore's Law is simply a measure of the increase in the number of electronic devices per chip, then Moore's Law has much more time to go, probably decades," Rattner said in an interview with Network World. Separately, IBM scientists are building computer chips out of DNA.  Rattner, who is CTO of the world's biggest chipmaker and the head of Intel Labs, the company's primary research arm, predicted that chip architecture will "undergo dramatic changes" in the coming decades but that silicon itself will remain the core element for the foreseeable future. The National Science Foundation is already preparing for a post-silicon world, having requested $20 million in federal funding for research that could improve or replace current transistor technology. Intel is now moving to a 32-nanometer process for chip production, an upgrade over the existing 45-nanometer process. "There's plenty of life left in silicon," Rattner says. "We're well along in our 32-nanometer development and I think we'll show some significant product-level results at 32. Right now, in terms of silicon technology we don't feel like we're at some point of demise in any sense. Beyond the search for ever-greater performance and efficiency, Intel's researchers today are striving to make chips more compatible with server virtualization technologies, such as the VMware and Xen hypervisors. And there are still new approaches to the way we build transistors and devices that will involve silicon and newer materials, like our high-k metal gate silicon technology." The high-k metal gate technology uses hafnium-based circuitry, which Intel adopted to create smaller processors that are faster and more energy-efficient.

Just a decade ago, Intel had a hard time convincing its own chip designers that virtualization was an important feature, but times have changed quickly. "Virtualization has become mandatory," Rattner says. "We had a lot of work to do to convince the chip designers that this was a really important feature. What we think of today as supercomputer applications will ultimately move down to desktops, laptops and even mobile phones, Rattner says. At first they looked at it, kind of squinted and said 'really'? Now it's just about the most important thing in the product." Rattner, who will deliver the opening address at the SC supercomputing conference in Portland, Ore., in November, also discussed how supercomputing power is being packed into smaller and smaller form factors. Intel is building many new "system on chip" designs that will add new capabilities to a variety of Internet-connected devices, such as robotics, set-top boxes and various mobile Internet devices. Rattner says "mobile augmented reality" will become a part of everyday life, with cameras that you can point at an object – such as a famous ruin – and instantly receive detailed information about what it is. "That's augmented reality, where you take real world information, and you overlay the virtual information that informs you about the scene," Rattner says. "Beyond that, what we see happening is an increasing amount of what we call perceptual computing tasks, as small form factor machines have richer sensor capabilities."

Piracy's global economic impact debated

There's no question that software piracy is a global problem with a heavy financial impact. A May 2009 report by the Business Software Alliance and IDC estimated that 20% of software programs installed in the U.S. last year were unauthorized copies. But just how heavy it is is a matter of debate. Worldwide, the figure is 41%, with an estimated financial impact of $53 billion - a figure based on the retail value of the pirated PC software.

If it were, the BSA's global loss figure of $53 billion would drop sharply, they maintain. "Obviously, not every piece of pirated software will be replaced immediately with legitimate software if underlicensing is addressed or sources of pirated stuff dry up," acknowledges Dale Curtis, the BSA's vice president of communications. But critics of the study say it fails to account for the possibility that pirated software could be replaced with Linux or other open-source options. But he says that over the years, IDC has found "a very strong correlation between piracy rates and software sales. One country that wasn't included is Canada - and that doesn't sit right with Michael Geist, a professor at the University of Ottawa. "What the BSA did not disclose is that the 2009 report on Canada (whose piracy rate declined from 33% to 32% in the study) were guesses since Canadian firms and users were not surveyed. In country after country, as the piracy rate falls, legitimate sales go up." A second criticism of the report is that its country-by-country figures are partly based on the results of an annual survey that in 2009 covered 24 countries. While the study makes seemingly authoritative claims about the state of Canadian piracy, the reality is that IDC . . . did not bother to survey in Canada," Geist wrote in a May 27 blog post.

Further, he says Canadian users were surveyed the previous year, and "there is no reason to assume large changes in results from one year to the next." Ivan Png, a professor of information systems and economics at the University of Singapore, says the BSA and IDC should explain how they applied the results from the 24 countries surveyed to all of the other countries not surveyed. "IDC should make the methodology transparent," Png says. Curtis responds that the study "is not a guess, nor is it a scientific measurement, nor is it based primarily on a survey of software users, as Geist suggests." A survey of 6,200 users is only a piece of the model, Curtis says.

Lenovo founder shares slogans, tells tales of 1980s China

The chairman of Lenovo, the world's number four PC maker, shared Chinese revolution-spirited slogans and the unlikely story of his company's growth out of a government-managed economy in a motivational speech to Chinese small business owners on Friday. Lenovo faced tough odds even though its founders were from the Chinese Academy of Sciences, a Chinese state-controlled institute for national research projects. Liu Chuanzhi, one of 11 former government researchers who founded the predecessor to Lenovo in 1984, recalled how the company fought through trade barriers, high component prices and domination by foreign brands in a talk that highlighted how fast China's economy has grown in the last three decades. "In 1993 almost the whole market was foreign-branded computers," Liu said at the forum for small and medium businesses in Hangzhou, a scenic city in eastern China.

The academy gave the company founding capital of 200,000 yuan, or about US$30,000 today. Things only grew worse when the company was scammed out of two-thirds of the money, he said. "When we came out, we not only lacked funds but also had no idea what to do," Liu said. That sum, far from enough, would not have been enough to buy three computers in China in the 1980s, Liu said. Lenovo, formerly called Legend Group, was founded early in China's process of market economic reforms and had to work in a tightly regulated environment. The low quality of components such as hard drives in China also hindered the company, he said.

China tried to protect domestic PC makers in the 1980s by charging a massive 200 percent tariff on foreign computers, said Liu. "The result of this protection was that foreign computers were very difficult to get into China and could only be smuggled, but China also could not make its own computers very well," he said. Lenovo's first PC did not reach the market until 1990. Lenovo struggled with low margins even as it built market share against foreign brands like IBM and Compaq in the 1990s. Government regulation also continued to slow the industry's growth. Lenovo's global presence gained a huge boost when it bought IBM's PC unit in 2005. The company's sales in developed markets have since slumped in the global economic recession and it has restructured to bring its focus back to China and other emerging markets. Chinese residents had to register with the government to become Internet users even late in the decade, said Liu. Lenovo today is the top PC vendor in China. Liu also emphasized the importance of company culture, describing Lenovo's as an example. "Make the company's interests the top priority, seek truth in forging ahead, take the people as the base," Liu said.

To succeed like Lenovo, companies must "love to battle, know how to battle, and conduct campaigns with order," Liu said, using language reminiscent of "The Art of War," an ancient Chinese book on military strategy by Sun Tzu. Chinese president Hu Jintao has promoted the slogan "take the people as the base" as a part of socialist theory. Liu attended a Chinese military college in the 1960s and worked on a Chinese farm during the Cultural Revolution, a chaotic period when many graduates were sent to the countryside for re-education.

19 Free Web Services That Keep Saving You Money

Sifting through all of the free sites and services available on the Web, you've probably come up with some favorites, such as instant messaging tools or video streaming sites like Hulu. Those are great, but what about freebies that displace something for which you usually pay? Think beyond free antivirus software and other no-cost PC utilities-how would you like free long-distance calling, MP3 downloads, e-books, and text messaging? I'll show you how to score those and more.

Some of these offerings, such as free services for making and receiving faxes, are for an introductory level of a paid product. Others are ad-supported or public services. But each one is a compelling way to get something, for free, that ordinarily costs you money. In many cases you'll get just as much as what you used to pay for-or more.

Make Free Long-Distance Calls

Sure, you can voice-chat around the world through Skype and other services. But Talkster lets you reach out and touch an actual telephone in addition to online calling options.

Free long-distance and international calls are worth putting up with a couple drawbacks. The service requires you to perform a convoluted dialing procedure: It gives you a special local number to reach a faraway friend, and your pal gets a local number too. You dial your local number, after which you have 10 seconds to tell your buddy to call back on their local number. You stay on the line and wait while they hang up and dial back.

You might hear an ad while waiting to connect again, but the two of you can talk as long as you want after the hook-up is complete. I thought calls sounded good, although one call recipient questioned the quality.

Send and Receive Faxes, No Fees Involved

Do you need to send faxes just once in a while? Ditch the fax machine and the trips to Kinko's, and use free-to-try online services such as Qipit and FaxZero.

Qipit lets you send up to five faxes each week for free. You can upload JPEG images or even send them directly from a camera phone. Free faxes include a header banner that mentions Qipit.

FaxZero limits you to two faxes of three pages each day, and its transmissions include a FaxZero-branded coversheet. But instead of sending images, FaxZero takes PDFs and Word documents, making it a better choice for PC-based use.

You can even cancel your dedicated incoming fax line and have people send physical faxes to you online. eFax Free handles everything, digitizing faxes and routing them to your e-mail account. You get a free phone number that is connected to eFax and is always listening for incoming calls.

eFax Free has a few limitations, however. You don't get to pick an area code for the incoming number, and you can't receive more than 100 pages each month. Plus, you have to read faxes in an eFax application, in its proprietary .efx format. (Paying subscribers can select an area code, receive more faxes, and read them as PDFs.) But for moderate use, eFax Free works well.

Videoconference for Free

Most chat and videoconferencing programs are free when your conversation remains between two people, but they charge you to add more. Instant messaging and videoconferencing tool TokBox blasts past that limitation, restricted only by your bandwidth.

When you begin a videoconference in TokBox, you can automatically add contacts who are on AIM, Yahoo Messenger, and other supported services. Even better, however, your contacts can join the videoconference in a Web browser, just by following a URL. They don't need to install an application, and the TokBox Web site automatically interfaces with each PC's Webcam. Just start a conference, and click Invite, Share Link to get the URL.

Make Free Conference Calls

Running a meeting on a shoestring? Just want to organize a family call across the country? Rondee provides free conference calls for up to 50 people, and it offers several great extras.

You can launch a conference call immediately, simply by notifying your participants and giving them a Rondee PIN. But if you plan a call in advance, the service will send calendar-compatible e-mail invitations (with all call-in details) and make a list of replies. It'll even provide a nonspeaking access code, too, so that you can invite people to listen but not talk.

You can activate voice recording for calls planned in advance, as well. After everyone hangs up, participants receive e-mail instructions for downloading the meeting as an MP3 file.

Use a No-Cost Directory-Assistance Service

Does your mobile phone carrier gouge you for directory-assistance calls? Instead of dialing 411, try Google 411. Dial 800/466-4411 (800/GOOG-411). The voice-recognition tool looks up numbers, addresses, nearby businesses, and more for free.

Next: Free Services for Taking Notes, Working With Files, and Grabbing E-Books and MP3s

Automatically Transcribe Voice Notes for Free

You probably have your phone handy more often than you have paper and a pen nearby. If inspiration hits, you could thumb-in text notes on your handset-or, better yet, try reQall for automatic voice transcription.

You call a special phone number and speak your message (up to 30 seconds), and reQall writes it down. Depending on what you say, it will even store your notes contextually, adding items you want to buy to a shopping list or scheduling meetings in your calendar, for example. But I like it just as much for recording my random notes and automatically e-mailing them to myself-or my contacts-without having to type.

Turn Scanned Docs Into Text, at No Cost

OCR (optical character recognition) turns pictures of text into a document that you can edit. For example, you could read a photo of a book page, but OCR software lets you perform searches on that page's contents or make changes to it in any text editor. Typically you have to pay for such software or get it bundled with a scanner you purchase, but you can access free OCR tools online.

OCR Terminal can import 20 pages of documents each month for free. Just upload your items as PDFs or JPEGs, or in other image formats, and it will convert them to Word, text, and other document formats. Then you simply download the best format for your needs, and use it as you would any other document.

Read Free E-Classics

Because copyrights eventually expire, anyone can (re)publish works by William Shakespeare, Mark Twain, Jane Austen, and countless other writers. In general, if you're paying for material that was written before 1923, you're being fleeced. Instead, download thousands of classics for free, for use on your computer, phone, Kindle, or other device.

Project Gutenberg houses 30,000 free e-books and includes links to a total of 100,000 hosted on other sites. Just search the site for a title, or browse the top 100 downloads to get a sense of the catalog. Download books in a format that your device can read, and transfer them over. You'll gain access to a deep library without paying a cent.

Beat the Text-Messaging Swindle

Stop paying to send text messages. Several free options can transmit them from your PC or phone; just make sure to keep your missives under the 160-character limit.

Within AIM, you can send a message just by chatting with the country code and mobile number of a friend. For example, you can send text to the number of a pal in the U.S. in the format +12223334444. Your friend can reply, and the text will route to your chat program. It works even if you're chatting directly on a phone's mobile client.

In a Web browser, try txtDrop or Krypton. For the former, you just enter your address and the recipient's number. For the latter, you need to know the recipient's carrier, but the iPhone-friendly formatting looks great on many handsets.

If you know your friend's carrier, you can also send a text through e-mail. Enter your friend's mobile phone number and then the domain suffix for the carrier. For example, e-mail messages sent to 2223334444@txt.att.net, 2223334444@messaging.sprintpcs.com, and 2223334444@vtext.com would reach AT&T, Sprint, and Verizon, respectively. Visit Wikipedia's list of carriers for details about other services. Note, however, that the recipient might have blocked incoming texts from any of these sources to shut out spam messages.

Store Large Files Online for Free

Most e-mail servers choke on messages that are 5MB, 10MB, or larger. You could sign up for a range of free sites that offer to host bigger files, but Drop.io beats all of those since it hosts files and doesn't make you go through any sign-up process.

You can upload attachments of up to 100MB, and you can even customize the resulting URL. Afterward, simply send the link to your contacts so that they can download the files. (Be sure to click Share, Zip File at the top to make the whole package downloadable at once.) Downloaders can even leave notes and collaborate in other ways.

Download Free MP3s

Downloading an MP3 for free is often perfectly legal. With just a little scrounging, you can score tracks from many legitimate sources.

Check music stores first. Amazon, Rhapsody, and others regularly offer free tracks by familiar musicians.

Music blogs often post free tracks, many of which come from record labels for promotional purposes. Visit Elbows, RCRD LBL, and Stereogum regularly for frequent freebies.

The Internet Archive hosts thousands of live music performances, recorded by and for fans. You'll find old and new favorites, including concerts by Ryan Adams, Andrew Bird, Cowboy Junkies, the Grateful Dead, Smashing Pumpkins, and many more.