New cooling solution for the next generation...

As we all know, the main barrier to having super-fast processors and chips is that they need cooling and today's technology just isn't up to the job. A few (nutters) people have experimented with overclocking processors and cooling them using liquid nitrogen - see this site for a P4 that reached 5.24Ghz clock speed when cooled to -190 degrees C, but this isn't really practical for most of us !

The BBC news site today mentions a new method of cooling chips which uses "ionic wind" to dissipate the heat produced by increasingly powerful devices. Apparently the reason why fans don't cool as much as we think they do is that as the air from the fan wafts over the chip, the molecules nearest to the chip's surface can get stuck and therefore hinder the cooling process. Purdue University researchers have developed a way to shift these "stuck molecules" by using a small voltage which when applied to the ionic engine positively charges particles at one end of the chip which are then dragged towards a negatively charged wire at the other end thereby forcing constant air movement. This effect apparently increases the cooling effect of conventional fans by a massive 250% which could mean that faster and smaller chips can be produced.

Blimey !

Microsoft - apparently not the innovator we thought it was...

This rather long, and rather angry sounding (!) article by F.W. van Wensveen argues that Microsoft has not actually innovated anything since its foundation in 1975. We all know the story of the design for the Windows GUI being "nicked" from Apple, but the article argues that precisely nothing has been innovated by the mega-corp since its inception. If you have a spare few minutes (read: half hour !) it makes some interesting points about Microsoft's products over the years...

Worried about data security on your old hard disks ?

As we all know, there's only one way to ensure that your data can not be retrieved from your old hard disks - and that's by destroying them ! Have a look at the video below to see an industrial shredder make mincemeat of a number of hard disks. I want one !