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February 2005

By Cliff Millward, Editor cliffm@xmission.com

By Any Other Name . . .

Intel has added a pair of trademarks to its roster of protected names. They are ‘Intel Inside VIIV’ and ‘Intel VIIV

There’s a considerable amount of head-scratching going on as to what the chip giant is thinking. The speculation isn’t helped by Intel’s refusal to comment, even though the trademark filings are a matter of public record.

Some say the ‘VIIV’ is a reference to a dual-core (‘II’) Pentium 5 (‘V’). Other suggest the symbol indicates 64-bit: VI for six, IV for 4. That said, LXIV would be a better indicator of 64-bit technology, perhaps, and certainly a more accurate way of showing the number in Roman numerals.

Either way - and neither idea has been confirmed in any way - the meaning is not immediately obvious and it doesn’t follow the company’s usual approach to technology naming schemes.

DDR . . . DDR2 . . DDRGrrrrr . . . . .

Samsung Semiconductor plans to expand its production of DDR2 memory this year to the point where DDR2 becomes its largest product category, setting the stage for decreases in price,

DDR2 (double data rate 2) memory is the planned successor to DDR SDRAM (synchronous dynamic RAM), the standard currently used in most of the world’s PCs. The first DDR2 chips started to appear last year at around the time Intel launched its 915 chip set for desktop PCs.

The company expects to ship more DDR2 chips than DDR chips in the third quarter of 2005, and will exit the year with DDR2 representing 44 percent of its memory chip shipments. Samsung enjoys the top spot in market share for DRAM memory chips, accounting for 29 percent of the total market in 2004, according to market research.

Over the past few years, memory vendors have improved their chips’ performance by increasing the speeds at which they process data, much the way Intel did for years with processors. As speeds of DDR memory chips exceed 400 MHz, however, the overall performance of the chip begins to suffer due to increased signal noise. DDR2 memory improves the clarity of those signals, paving the way for speed increases up to 667 MHz.

Web News

 The web as we know it was invented by a British academic working in Switzerland. Is a Nordic academic working in Britain about to redefine it forever?

Frode Hegland, a researcher at University College London, wants to change the basic structure of information on the net.

In Hegland’s web, all documents are editable, and every word is a potential hyperlink.

Hegland is based at University College London’s Interaction Centre and collaborates with Doug Engelbart, inventor of the mouse. Engelbart refers to Hegland’s project as “the next stage of the web.”

Hegland’s idea is simple -- he plans to move beyond the basic hypertext linking of the web, and change every word into a “hyperword.” Instead of one or two links in a document, every single word becomes a link. Further, every link can point to more than one place, pulling up all kinds of background context from the web as a whole.

Click on a politician’s name and find out who donated to his or her campaign. Click on a town name in a news story and find out what else has happened there.

“We feel that a large part of the history of technology, digital and otherwise, has been about the production of information,” Hegland said. “It’s time to focus on consumption, to help people navigate through information and get relevant information into their heads.”

The project started in 2003, but Hegland has been thinking about interfaces and information for a long time. “I’ve been working on these ideas since 1991,” he said. Then the web happened.

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