The day DRM died

Amazon has launched a DRM-free music store. 2 million songs, MP3 format, 256 kbps encoding, no restrictions. With two major labels (EMI and Universal) having dropped restrictions, device-agnostic music is only a matter of time.

How to be an evil overlord

First rule of crisis management: contain the problem. Whatever you do, don't make it worse. Apparently, the ongoing protests in Burma had nearly petered out before the regime made the mistake of annoying the country's Buddhist monks. (Beating several and reportedly killing one.) Now they've got thousands of people in the streets, and any crackdown will echo around the world. Oops.

(Nor is the short term success of any such crackdown a foregone conclusion. In a devoutly Buddhist country, ordering soldiers to attack unarmed monks chanting loving kindness mantras is problematic, to say the least.)

Fifty years ago today

Fifty years ago today, federal troops escorted nine black students into Little Rock's Central High School.

It wasn't the end of racism in America. Goodness knows we're still fighting that battle. It wasn't even the end of racially motivated mob violence. But it was the end of the notion that such violence, or the white supremacist attitudes that motivated it, carried any kind of moral authority. As Eisenhower made clear (PDF) at the time, "A foundation of our American way of life is our national respect for law." Mob rule could not be, and was not, allowed to trump the rule of law.

(The Eisenhower Presidential Archives has an extensive collection of documents related to the Little Rock crisis.)

Atoms are really really small

When the first STM images appeared, they were a revelation. No one had ever seen individual atoms before. Since then, various technologies have pushed imaging to mind-boggling extremes. The latest is the announcement from FEI that they've resolved the dumbbell structure of germanium, a 0.14 nm feature. Wow.

(Both silicon and germanium have a pair of atoms, or dumbbell, at each lattice point. Germanium is larger, so resolving it is slightly easier. Slightly.)

Can we have a do-over, please?

Sanyo Electric Co.'s semiconductor subsidiary is for sale, and apparently the auction isn't going to close until the sellers get a result they like. The subprime mortgage shock to global credit markets has made potential buyers nervous, while the banks holding Sanyo's corporate debt are eager to put a floor under the sale. Nikkei Business has the story.

Three cores are better than none

A few weeks ago, I was talking with someone about redundant cells as a route to improved memory yields. I asked whether multiple cores might provide a similar boost for logic chips. My interviewee (who will remain anonymous to avoid embarrassment) didn't seem to think much of the question, suggesting that redundant cores would only make sense for chips with many more cores than are currently available.

So I felt vindicated this week, when AMD both announced a triple-core chip and confirmed that it is based on a quad-core architecture in which "one of the cores is disabled." For instance by a manufacturing defect.

People who've been around a while may remember that Intel pulled a similar trick with the 80486SX microprocessor, which was simply an 80486DX with a defective math coprocessor. And why not? Getting a lower price for a less capable chip is certainly better than adding to the scrap pile.

Back to high school

I usually give the mass media a pass on technology issues. If physicists are arguing about something, it can be very difficult for a reporter who doesn't cover the space to even understand the question, much less say anything intelligent about it.

I couldn't let this howler go, though. From the usually excellent LA Times: "Solar panels are usually made of silicon, and the world is running out of it."

Um, no. Silicon is the second most common element in the earth's crust, after oxygen. Subtract the organic matter from ordinary dirt and what's left is mostly silicate or silicon dioxide. We'll run out of, say, hydrocarbons long before we even scratch the global supply of silicon. While there are supply issues around the very pure silicon needed for solar panels and integrated circuits, they have to do with capital expansion lag in those markets, not the fundamental availability of the material.