My dorm room is asymptotically approaching perfection. Two weeks ago, I won a Google lava lamp when they came to school to give a tech talk. It actually has the Google logo on the base! And today, my aunt brought me a real ‘One Way’ road sign that she said she got at a yard sale. At least it was stolen originally! Due to the difficulty of hanging heavy things in dorm rooms without damaging the walls, I had to put it somewhere where it can lean against the wall. The arrow currently points out the window. It’s classy.
These two recent additions join a room whose walls are covered with Weezer, Phish, DMB, Harry Potter, U2, and Paul Simon posters. There’s a poster dating back to the Nintendo 64 days of Mario in a bunny suit holding a silicon wafer (IBM designed the 64 chips, codenamed Gekko, and they were manufactured in Burlington). An upside-down C-3PO mask watches over the corner of my room, and there is a really colorful Peanuts mural that I made by cutting up an old calendar. The best part, of course, is the view I have of the river and the Rochester skyline from my sixth floor window.
I’ll try to post some pictures of my room when I get a chance. Everyone who comes in loves the way it is set up and decorated. I can’t say that I disagree 
My biggest pet peeves with the T9 typing system:
- When I type 63, I want the word ‘me’ to come up first, not ‘of’.
- It’s funny how T9 doesn’t recognize the most common used texting abbreviations. When I press the 8 key, ‘u’ should show up, because it is more likely to be used by itself than ‘t’. And if you push the next key, ‘v’ comes up? You have to push next twice to get to ‘u’. Who made this behavior standard?
- Same thing with the 9 key, give me a ‘y’ instead of an ‘x’.
- Why don’t common contractions show up unless you put in an apostrophe? I want to be able to type ‘isnt’ just like that but instead I get ‘grou’. Hello, T9 developers, ‘grou’ isn’t a word, give me a better choice. I get ‘theses’ instead of ‘theres’ and ‘warmt’ instead of ‘wasnt’ as well.
This list is by no means complete; its just the annoyances I came up with off the top of my head. My biggest question is if T9 can learn new words by typing in abc mode, than why can’t it become smarter about which words I use most often? If I end up with ‘me’ more often than ‘of’, then give me ‘me’ next time. That’s what Quicksilver does.
If I had a phone that ran Linux, I would so hack T9.
Intel today released the schematics of the 4004, the world’s first microprocessor on a chip. The 4004 was released 35 years ago today, on November 15, 1971. This revolutionary chip had only 2,300 transistors (compare that with the millions of transistors found on microprocessors today). It supported a maximum clock speed of 740kHz and used 4-bit data words. Today’s chips are 5-6 orders of magnitude faster and use 32- or 64-bit words.
No human alive is capable of analyzing today’s processors at the transistor level. Digital design these days happens largely at the block level. Simply put, a group of engineers design the individual blocks (arithmetic unit, floating-point unit, registers, data control, bus, etc.) and then another group combines the blocks to create the processor. Specialized software programs, called CAD or Computer Aided Design tools, exist to make this process simpler. They determine how the millions of transistors will be laid out and how they will be wired together.
The 4004, on the other hand, was designed during an era where computers were mostly glorified calculators. Every one of the 2,300 transistors used in the chip was lovingly drawn into the schematic by an engineer. This makes it possible for anyone who has taken at least a semester of logic design to grasp the majority of what’s going on in this chip. These schematics are invaluable for undergraduates who are seeking comprehensive examples beyond those provided by the textbook of complete but simple digital systems. I would have loved to be able to look at these last year and see how my classroom knowledge lined up with a real, commercial product.
Continue reading ‘Intel Releases 4004 Schematics - Great for Students’
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