I guess I'm not the only person skeptical about quantum computing. The head of Darpa points out that analog computing doesn't scale well, and that's what quantum computers actually are.

The long awaited industry upturn seems to be real. Fab utilization climbed above 85% in the second quarter. Utilization rates above 90% usually trigger new fab construction.

900 words yesterday, 175320 since January 1.

For some indeterminate time, the graphs in the Reference Section have been unreadable due to a formatting problem at my end. Now fixed. My apologies for the inconvenience.

As part of the fix, I trimmed the running book-to-bill chart to only include data since January, 1997. Anyone who needs earlier data (back to February 1996) should leave a comment or contact me directly.

1350 words yesterday, 174,420 since January 1.

Good news and bad news for the chip industry this week. The good news is that Gartner Group's latest forecast still expects 11.2% growth this year. The bad news is the recovery isn't happening soon enough to save 600 jobs at IBM Microelectronics, mostly in the company's Essex Junction, VT facility.

I raise my word goal, and immediately slack off. Oh well. 2550 words since my last update, 173,070 since January 1.

For the People With No Life file, here's a bit of code that will send an instant message when a blog is visited. Now, I like traffic as much as the next site owner, but getting a notice whenever someone visits? I don't think so.

Stephen Wolfram's treatise, A New Kind of Science has been out long enough for people to have actually read it. The consensus seems to be that he may be onto something, but it's awfully hard to separate his self-promotional tendencies from the content of his ideas.