Shameless Words from Shameless Geeks

I just saw a /. post entitled PCMark Memory Benchmark Favors GenuineIntel. I’m a little concerned about how quickly the crowd went straight into “Intel paid them to cheat” before thinking about other possibilities. I’m not trying to say that Chipzilla is virtuous in this matter, but lets be fair about it.

First of all, how many of the libraries that they use are written by Intel for promotional purposes? I can remember (many moons ago) writing some DSP and graphics code for DirectX. At the time, the best code for the job was the Performance Library Suite that was available for free. Naturally, it was used in a lot of places. The problem was that it was written by Intel for the purposes of pushing their own chips. Each level of the Pentium (yeah, it was a while ago) ran it’s own pre-compiled library. Anything not identified as a Pentium defaulted to software emulation of some of the SSE features. This, of course, led to a skewed result when using the libraries for comparison.

Secondly, it is ultimately the responsibility of a vendor to make sure that their code doesn’t skew results. If their code doesn’t work properly on some CPU’s, they should clearly indicate so. I haven’t used PCMark2005, so the software may already have some kind of indication built in. A feature like this would have warned the user not to trust the results of the test.

Lastly, VIA should take an active role in making sure that they don’t get shortchanged on tests. How about a library that takes advantage of the chip’s strengths? Maybe even partnering with the spec vendors? It seems to me that they would be foolish to trust that a secondary chip vendor would get equal treatment without having someone help things along.

Honestly… the whole big-business-is-cheating conspiracy theory thing is getting old. It really doesn’t sound good when I hear it coming from fellow geeks.

I bumped up against this link about Engineers making good terrorists because the traits that make a good engineer also make a good terrorist. Hmmm… Don’t those same traits make a good doctor, lawyer, athlete, businessman, etc?

The next problem: Engineers are over-represented in the leadership of that mean old terrorist organization. The article also mentions that scientists, chemists, and medical degrees are desirable. Basically, they are looking for smart people. Fascinating! What a concept! Look for smart people to run your affairs! This is going to revolutionize all of society!

Since we are all goint to be terrorists, lets pick a leader. I nominate Bob Dobbs, the SubGenius. He will lead us from the fires of … something, toward the ultimate utopia of … something else. Whatever.

In a move that can’t be popular at RIAA, Sony BMG has finally decided to drop Digital Rights Management (DRM) restrictions from downloaded music. Well, I’ve been telling the music industry for years to stop biting the hand that feeds it. DRM was a stupid idea whose sole beneficiary was the industry that generated DRM code.

That’s right… I’m sure it was my ranting that caused them to change their minds… Two years later… Without consulting me directly.

I ran into an interesting article on /. pointing out that Maryland will begin taxing “custom computer programming”. Most of what is there is the typical mix of chicken-littles and political pundits giving their useless opinions. All perfectly fine for a blog, but useless if you are trying to find the real story.

So… can anyone out there point me toward a genuine resource for this? I live in VA, and may have an occasion to do some work in MD. I’d like to know what I can expect in the way of state taxes.

It looks like the study-hounds are beginning to advance the idea that telecommuting may not be the evil thing feared by all management. When I was permitted to, I loved telecommuting once per week. It’s a good way to break up the long week and throw a change into your daily routine. It’s also a good thing to do if you are working on something that requires long periods of isolation. I’ve found that, once I have defined a problem, I can sometimes solve it twice as fast if I attack it in silence.

There is a down side to telecommuting that the article doesn’t mention. If you work in a politically charged environment, your absence from the office may cause you to fall victim to internal politics. For that reason, I wouldn’t recommend telecommuting more that once a week, twice for special circumstances. That way, you can be there to defend yourself when questions are asked.

Sony reports that the PS3 is currently incompatible with 200+ PS2 games. The announcement, of course, came after store shelves were emptied by the Japan launch of the system. Yet another product launched before it was ready? You be the judge.

Yep, It’s official, AMD has absorbed ATI. The dirty deed was done today. Needless to say: It’s the end of an era.

I’m always a little sad to see a choice removed from the list. It’s pretty obvious that they won’t want to compete with themselves on chipset sales. It also takes out the possibility that either of these companies will enter into the other’s traditional business (ie. there is now no chance that ATI will start making CPU’s). Ah well… lets hope for the best.

BTW:
If you try to visit www.ati.com you get redirected to ati.amd.com. I’m going to miss the slightly-over-the-top bright red ATI site. AMD ’s site is adequate, but boring. One thing they missed… The ATI pages still allow you to view prices in Canadian dollars. I wonder how long that will last.

As anticipated, Intel is preparing to launch quad-core Xeons in November. Four cores will certainly increase performance, but they will not have twice the performance of a dual-core, or four times the performance of a single core.

For the foreseeable future, there will be no reason for the average home user to go with anything more than a dual core, and even that should be reserved for power-users and gamers. The current state-of-the-art in software development makes very poor use of multiple CPU’s. Until programmers understand the implications of having code running in multiple places at the same time, this situation is unlikely to change.

After having said all of that, I’m still wondering what AMD’s response will be. C’mon guys… get back in the game!

In one of the largest displays of cowardice yet, Radio Shack management decided to conduct a major layoff via email. There are some things that should be handled in person. Layoffs would be at the top of that list.

I worked part-time for the shack years ago. I was impressed by how successful a group of clueless managers could be. Well, it looks like the successful part has changed, but not the clueless part.

Intel is making the very welcome move of open-sourcing the GMA 3000 video drivers for Linux. This goes completely against the standard graphics OEM convention of excessive paranoid secrecy about their video drivers. Hopefully, it will allow the Linux community to tune and tweak the drivers for the benefit of all.

Unfortunately, graphics chip makers usually keep their drivers extremely secret. The claim is that they do so to protect the chip design. Most of us know that this is a bogus excuse, and that the real reason is so that nobody will see the “optimizations” (read as “cheats") that they put in for specific games and benchmarks. They certainly have the right to keep their trade secrets… even if they are dishonest about why. I just wish that they would release the drivers to the Open Source community and let their hardware stand on it’s own merits. Then again… maybe that’s what they are really afraid of.

According to Anand, ATI is making major price cuts to it’s X1900 line in preparation for the release of the X1950 later this month. This is, of course, good news for gamers. It actually may push me into getting a new video card for the old 3800+ system. It also makes me wonder what Nvidia’s response will be.

We’ve all seen the Vonage ad with the kid breaking a sliding glass door with his baseball back swing. It looks a lot like recent news for Vonage stock holders. All I can think of to say about their recent IPO is:

People do stupid things! dootdoo dootdootdoo!

There have been rumors about some kind of AMD/ATI deal for months, and it looks like they are about to come true. AMD announced today that it will be purchasing ATI in a 5.4 billion dollar deal. Most of the rumors were about some kind of merger between the two companies. Last week, I heard a few whispers of an outright acquisition at various sites. I honestly discounted these as some analysts brain barf.

This will do a lot to change the chip landscape. Everyone was wondering about AMD’s next move in it’s quest to catch Chipzilla. Now we know.

Here’s a link to the official story from AMD.

That better late than never line is about me, not the chip. Unless you live under a rock, you couldn’t miss the fact that Intel has released it’s Athlon killer, and they did a good job of it. Unfortunately, some of us spent so much time reading the reviews that we didn’t have time to post anything. If your looking for reviews, I think this post on /. has about as many as you can stand.

From what I can tell, the new Intel chips will make mincemeat of the Athlon chips in most tasks. If they are actually able to deliver product at the listed prices, AMD will have a hard time giving away CPU’s. A sad statement from someone who has put Athlon’s into his last 2 desktops. When you find a chip with higher performance that runs at lower power for the same or less money, you don’t have much choice.

Kudos to Intel for finally figuring it all out. They spent too many years trying to do design by clock frequency, and it cost them half of the market. Now… What say you AMD? I’m hoping to see some kind of response soon.

It’s been so long since I heard any news about DRAM price fixing that I completely forgot about the issue. However, it looks like the law hasn’t. The New York Attorney General is suing major chip makers for fixing prices on DRAM. Let the shoosting begin.

I stumbled on a few articles about AMD’s clock synchronization tool online today. Apparently, it has been around since June. AMD’s web page states:

The AMD Dual-Core Optimizer can help improve some PC gaming video performance by compensating for those applications that bypass the Windows API for timing by directly using the RDTSC (Read Time Stamp Counter) instruction. Applications that rely on RDTSC do not benefit from the logic in the operating system to properly account for the affect of power management mechanisms on the rate at which a processor core’s Time Stamp Counter (TSC) is incremented. The AMD Dual-Core Optimizer helps to correct the resulting video performance effects or other incorrect timing effects that these applications may experience on dual-core or multiple processor systems.

There is also some speculation that this is AMD’s fabled “reverse hyper-threading” app that makes multiple cores look like one to an application. I’ll let you know when I get a chance to test it.

BTW… I would have linked to these guys, but they are the same ones who stole quotes from me without recognition or a link back. Screw ‘em.

Intel has announced that it is selling the division that produces XScale processors to Marvell Technology Group Ltd. This is a cost-cutting measure and is a step towards the goal of a “leaner, more agile and more efficient” Intel.

It’s one of the oddities of business that they hope to solve some of the problems caused by their x86 business by cutting loose a tiny, unrelated division. Luckily, it looks like Marvell intends to keep most of the current employees.

Bill Gates announced today that he has decided to quit working for Microsoft and instead focus all his time on his foundation. I guess now that he has conquered the business world he has decided to focus his attention on creating a utopian paradise.

Note: This change isn’t scheduled to happen until 2008.

Is it ever going to end? Today’s news contains no less that 3 new patent lawsuits threatening to shut down major sections of large technology companies. In the first one, USA Video Technology Corp is suing most of the major cable operators. In the second, Creative is suing Apple (yet again) over the iPod and it’s user interface. In the third, C2 Communications is suing seven US Telecommunications providers over Internet phone services.

Again we see what we have to look forward to now that shysters control US business. In the first case, it looks like we have a little jackpot justice going on. In the second, we have two antagonistic companies who have been using portfolios of ludicrous patents as blunt weapons in a slugfest. In the third, it look like a good old fashioned patent troll. You know… a “technology” company composed mostly of lawyers.

Will somebody PLEASE do something about the USPTO and our patent system in general? This may look like a matter that only big companies need worry about until you remember who ultimately pays for all this. No matter what the outcome of the iPod litigation, the price of personal music devices will eventually reflect not only any fines, penalties and settlements incurred, it will also reflect all of the salaries and bonuses of the legal departments of both the winning and losing companies. The USPTO has become so inept, and has caused so much chaos that it should either be disbanded, or replaced by a half-dozen rodeo clowns.

I hope this isn’t all of it, but it appears that AMD is starting it’s response to Conroe. Having CPU cores with independent power control would be a very nice thing for the Turion. The announcement of the dual dual core 4x4 (is that a valid term?) seems almost to be a “me too” response to Intel’s announcement of quad cores in 2007.

I really hope that AMD comes up with a better response than this. I’d like to continue buying their CPU’s. Unfortunately, I don’t believe in brand loyalty, so I’ll switch to Intel if they have the best product. My real wish is that the competition continues to be close, so that quality goes up and price goes down.

Update:
Anandtech has a more detailed view of AMD’s recent announcements that still seem somewhat unconvincing. They gush about the new HTX connection that will allow for a high-speed cache-coherent connection to the CPU for high performance add-on cards. I am. however, still skeptical. Though VLB and AGP were great special-purpose buses in their day, I think it may be hard to talk a large company into making two completely different products (thats two sets of hardware, two sets of drivers, etc) to satisfy a small enthusiast market. Cost sensitivity and volume are much more important to add-on card manufacturers than to CPU manufacturers.

Update 2:
… and it looks like someone at Vulture Central is seeing things my way. Who am I to disagree?

Today was the anticlimactic release of the AMD Socket AM2 processors. It’s not that the chips are bad. In fact, they look quite impressive, sporting an increase in speed, drop in power consumption, and new DDR2 memory interface. It’s just that Intel has made such grandiose claims about the upcoming Conroe processors that a simple 1%-3% increase in CPU power is a big snore.

Intel is promising a huge bump in performance when the Conroe is released in a few weeks. Their claims of 40% improvement seem a little risky to me, but I hope they can make good on them. It will be interesting to see what AMD will answer with in the next few months.

After years of strenuously denying rumors of their hidden affair, have Dell and AMD finally decided to enter a meaningful partnership? Its true that the announcement is very, very small. However, it destroys the monogamous relationship that Dell once had with the formerly omnipotent Chipzilla. Rumors of this relationship seem to pop up every time Dell wants to re-negotiate with Intel. This time, however, is the first time that anyone has made an official public statement.

Will Dell declare it’s undying love for AMD? Will Intel find a way to sabotage the relationship, or seek solace in the arms of Apple? Tune in to the next installment of All My Silicon.

A recent study states that Software Engineers have the best jobs in the U.S. It’s not likely that I’ll be arguing with the wisdom of this conclusion, but I have to wonder… Who wrote the software that crunched the data? Hmmm…

Apple has just unveiled “boot camp", which allows Intel-based Macs to run Windows XP. Considering the number of hackers out there who were trying to do the same thing, it was inevitable that somebody would get Windows running on the Intel Mac.

It’s a reasonable business idea, but it appears that Apple is slowly getting rid of the things that distinguished it from the everyday PC. First the CPU, now the OS. How long before Apple starts selling re-badged Dells? (or vice-versa)

Resistance was futile. You have been assimilated.

Time Warner’s America Online division has officially renamed itself to AOL. If you are wondering what the AOL stands for now, the answer is: nothing… exactly what it stood for before

Intel released a new 3.73MHz version of the P4EE called the 965 Extreme Edition yesterday. Most of the hardware reviewers yawned. That’s what Intel gets when they have a hugely successful demo of the Conroe, then release something that is essentially a minor speed bump for an old design. It’s probably a perfectly good chip, but it doesn’t have a prayer of being a sales success now that everyone is waiting for the Conroe.

Fedora Core 5 was released yesterday. Sorry about the late post, but I have a day job . You can pick up a copy at http://download.fedora.redhat.com, or just use ftp at the same URL like I do.

One piece of advice… It probably isn’t a good idea to install using the “everything” option. In the past, that option has installed too many obscure and unnecessary packages, causing serious stability problems. It’s always a better idea to check over the packages that you will be installing.

Nvidia’s recent release of the G71 and G73 chips, along with ATI’s paper release of the X1800GTO, has cause a serious amount of information overload at PC enthusast websites. The huge volume of test results and benchmarks out there have taken up a significant amount of my time over the last few days. Just so that you don’t have to go through all of it too, here is my take on this:

1. The 7900GTX, which is the high-end version of the G71, has put Nvidia back in contention for the top slot. However, it isn’t a clear-cut winner. It is essentially a die shrink of the 7800GTX, allowing for a jump in clock speed and a corresponding jump in performance. The upside here is that the competition could spark a price war at the top end.

2. The 7900GT, which is essentially a 7900GTX with a stepped down clock and smaller heatsink, delivers a lot of bang for the buck. Add the fact that it generates less heat, requires less power, and generally contributes less noise to the system, and you have a major winner on your hands.

3. The 7600GT looks to be an excellent performer, but it enters as a mid-range product at a mid-range price. It is essentially a major refresh of the 6600GT, and should find a place in the <$200 market. ATI announced the release of the X1800GTO as a counter to this card, but it doesn't look like it quite measures up yet. The X1800GTO also look like it might be a paper launch only, and we'll have to wait and see if anyone actually releases a card that runs one.

It looks like NVidia is back in contention at the high end, with a solid hold on the mid-range market. ATI is still competitive, with what appears to be a slight edge at the top end. Competition this fierce is always good for the consumer. I can’t wait to see what ATI’s response is.

No, it isn’t a stock tip. It’s Intel’s statement that they will fight AMD by improving quality. If true, this will have a dramatic effect on the PC enthusiast in a few months. Welcome back Intel, we’ve missed you for the last few years.

Intel’s Conroe like looks like a winner so far. We’ll know for sure wen we see released hardware. Until then, it’s important to remember that AMD is still the performance champ.

The buzz surrounding the Intel Conroe demo has gotten deafening. You can see published benchmarks from AnandTech, Hexus.net, and many others that show Conroe with a significant performance lead over AMD’s FX-60. Intel was claiming a lead of 40% in both categories, prompting disbelief from a lot of us. Benchmarks are actually showing a little less than the 40% performance lead, but still a significant jump from the best AMD has to offer. Needless to say, the fanboys from both sides are out in force.

I say: don’t believe pre-release benchmarks… but don’t disbelieve them either.

I am glad to see that Intel is back in the performance game. It is quite likely that they will regain the performance crown from AMD when Conroe is released in Q3. However, I think that we need to back away from the numbers presented and wait until the chips and their systems are actually released.

The benchmarks published by the online trade rags seem to have been done completely on the up-and-up. The numbers seem to be a genuine attempt to tell us what they observed while doing their own testing. I detect no dishonesty. However…

Intel was in complete control of the test. They supplied the software, they supplied the hardware, they controlled the parameters. Anyone who has ever been involved in a hardware demo knows how easy it is for an over-zealous marketing dork to fudge one, and how difficult it can be to detect.

I, for one will wait until the CPU is released. On that day… Let the better chip win! If the Conroe performs as well as Intel is predicting, I’ll know what my next CPU purchase will be. Unless, of course, AMD’s counter-punch is even more impressive.

Nobody! It looks like there is no decision on the BlackBerry injunction yet, meaning that nobody has actually won the case yet. In addition, USPTO has issued a rejection to another NTP patent… 2 down, three to go.

I don’t know about you, but I’m so sick of patent trolls that I hope RIM wins, no matter what the violation was. The fact that NTP is just a patent holding house is good enough for me to consider them a leech on the tech industry.

… and doesn’t do too bad of a job this time. The sloth-like USPTO has issued a final rejection of NTP’s claims on one of the patents used in their suit against RIM. The 4 remaining patents in question have a status of “non-final rejection", which sounds like a close cousin to “limbo". Hopefully, this one rejection will be enough to stay the pending injunction.

Nice to see that NTP is getting called out for obtaining a patent on someone else’s work. Hopefully, they’ll soon end up in the dustbin of tech history… right next to SCO.

If the story is true that RIM’s new workaround for NTP patents takes the patented stuff out of the equation, this whole patent troll mess may come to a conclusion soon. Maybe someday, lawyers will no longer be able to make claims against IP that they had little or no creative input for… and the Cubs will win the World Series.

Yet another list of the losers of 2005. Wired has released it’s 2005 Vaporware Awards. Is the winner a surprise? Nah! It’s the current world record holder and vaporware icon. It’s only about 8 years late now. I was surprised to see that some of the winners are still being promised. I thought that TF2 and Starcraft: Ghost were long forgotten by Valve and Blizzard.

An apple a day keeps the doctor rich. Well, that’s what a Louisiana man suing Apple for hearing loss caused by an iPod might say. His claim is that listening to an iPod on full volume for more than 28 seconds a day can cause hearing loss. Funny thing is… he isn’t claiming that he actually suffered hearing loss. Looks like another “deep pockets” lawsuit is upon us. There is a really good solution to the whole problem… Turn the damn thing down!.

Whats next, something like this? : Microsoft Corporation was named in a lawsuit today by a West Virginia man claiming that Windows caused irreparable damage to his IQ. Film at 11.

Jeez.

Research In Motion got a little more ammunition in their fight against the Blackberry injunction when the USPTO issued a non-final rejection of all 5 of the NTP patents in dispute. Now we get to wait until Feb. 24th to find out if the judge will take the USPTO seriously, or will he grant NTP an injunction on Blackberry based on patents they should never have had.

This looks like a critical decision for the future of IP laws. If the injunction ends up being granted, then every NTP-like patent troll will think he has a right to sue. We’re waiting.

Intel claims that it has produced the first 45 nanometer chip. The new chip contains over 1 billion transistors, and is a 153MB SRAM chip. The current state-of-the-art feature size is 65 nm, and was put into production just last year.

Full scale production using the new process is scheduled to start in 2007. When it comes online, expect to see a jump in processor performance and memory density.

This should all be good news for consumers, even though it may end up as bad news for Intel’s competitors. AMD took over the performance crown from Intel a couple of years ago with their Athlon series of processors. Unfortunately for them, they are much smaller that the chip giant, and may not be able to push their manufacturing process forward as fast. The shift to smaller feature sizes may put the performance crown back on Intel’s head.

C-Net has a good article on Intel’s 45 nm process too.

AMD took a sizable chunk of the CPU marketplace from Intel last quarter. It’s about time that AMD got a large piece of this pie, considering that their chips have outperformed Intel for a few years straight. It’s always good to see someone rewarded for exceptional products.

As for fans of Intel… Don’t get too down. Intel’s latest releases didn’t beat AMD in performance yet, but they seem to indicate that chipzilla is back on track. It may not be long before they are back in contention for the performance lead.

Research In Motion tried to halt the upcoming injunction against blackberry by claiming public safety problems, but there hasn’t been any ruling yet. It looks like patent troll NTP will end up getting some sort of settlement from RIM, despite the fact that the USPTO may throw out the patents at the heart of the case. (and patent lawyers wonder why everyone equates them with toilet bowl scrapings)

Someday, the USPTO will come to it’s senses about what kind of damage the current IP laws are causing. When that day comes, I’ll ride my unicorn home, where I’ll use my bug-free version of Windows to play Duke Nukem Forever.

After years of development and testing, the F22A Raptor has finally been cleared for deployment. It’s nice to see the military spend 20 years developing something that they can actually use. It’s a far better outcome than what happened to the Comanche program.

It warmed my heart today to see an article about King Crimson guitarist Robert Fripp recording sounds for Windows Vista. Is this a signal that Windows Vista will be geared toward a more adult crowd? It would be a welcome change from the targeting of XP (which I have been known to refer to as BarneyOS). Hopefully, they’ll get rid of that annoying little mongrel that slows down searches too!

It looks like the USPTO is trying to do something about the indefensible mess that our patent system has turned into by requesting help from the OSS community.

Though I wish them all of the luck in the world, this initiative seems like it is doomed to failure.

First of all, you have an entire industry composed primarily of lawyers and other useless types who have made a fortune off of suing legitimate software efforts. These people won’t go away quietly. You can bet that they have already figured out how to use this to their advantage.

Second: What software guy is going to be able to sift through the mounds of legalese that compose a patent application to figure out whether there is anything like prior art? If you have ever had to read a patent application, you know what I mean. If you haven’t… try it some day.

Third: none of this will solve the real problem. Patents were originally an attempt to foster the advance of technology by giving the inventor and his backers a way to recoup development costs. Instead, they have morphed into weapons used to bludgeon any little guy with a new idea. The current advance of technology means that we can no longer continue to drag this IP anchor if we expect to keep up with foreign competition.

In what has become a tech industry joke, it looks like the yearly rumor about Dell and AMD is starting again. Some day, this may actually become true… but the “deal” has fallen through so many times that I would discard the fact quickly when thinking about the price of a stock. This seems to happen every time that Dell wants to re-negotiate prices with Intel… and it seems to work VERY well. It’s just a shame for Stephen Shankland that he was the one to fall for it this time. It would have been fine if he had mentioned all of the previous rumors.

This is the second C-NET article in as many days that contains a major rookie error. Yesterday, Joris Evers made a howling error by agreeing that the recent WMF bug was “a new breed of bug", then pointing out that it was similar to the problems with MS Office files in the past. Apparently, everyone has forgotten all of the DCOM and ActiveX bugs, Outlook exploits, image file exploits from the past, etc. Many of these were caused by features that include the ability to run code in “unintended ways".

What the heck is happening at C-NET? Sloppy. Sloppy. Sloppy.

That is… the performance cooks, not the components. If you are looking for something completely different in a PC case mod, check out what happened when Tom’s Hardware immersed their FX-55 in 8 gallons of cooking oil. They managed to accomplish the task, but I notice that they didn’t publish any of the performance results. It also looks like the potential for leaks will scare away most potential modders. Still… it is certainly an interesting concept.

It looks like geeks and gamers are beginning to get more and more clout in the automotive industry. According to Reuters, Nissan has embedded an XBox 360 in it’s Urge sports card prototype. To make things even more fun, the steering wheel and pedals become XBox input devices when the car is not running.

Oh great. Go ahead and blur the lines between Burnout and the real world. Luckily, all of my cars are cheap enough to make poor targets.

The biggest High-Tech news for this week has to be CES 2006 now running in Las Vegas. Since our budget is too small to allow for cross-country travel (can’t afford anything more than a cup of coffee, and only if it’s free) I decided that I’d just post a link to C-NET’s CES 2006 coverage and be done with the whole thing. This way, readers can belly-up to the buffet and pick their own stories of interest.

Of course, if anything we see in there is worthy of a geeky wisecrack, we won’t hesitate to duplicate the coverage. In addition, all geeks are invited to post their own wisecracks, as long as they are no worse than PG rated.

Intel has slipped out price lists for it’s new “Core” CPU lineup a few days ahead of the official announcement. Go ahead and check out the pricing, and we’ll see if anything changes when the chips are announced. I’ll post something after the official word is released.

There is a lot of buzz about the possible announcement of a Google branded PC. You can find mention on a few online rags, but they all seem to point back to this Jan. 1 article in the LA Times. We’ll see about whether this one actually happens. Seems less than likely, but I’ve been wrong before.

As far as I can tell from the widely varying articles out there, speculation is that Google will sign an agreement with a major distributor (Wal-Mart is most often mentioned) to distribute a very basic, Internet-capable PC running on a Google-designed Linux variant.

An intriguing idea, but not quite original. (anyone remember Lindows… er… Linspire?) Even if this rumor turns out to be true, it is likely to go no further than any of the previous attempts.

As expected, Intel will start a new marketing campaign soon after the new year begins. It’s not exactly a big news flash. It has been expected ever since a marketing guy took over the helm.

IMHO, the biggest change will be the modification of the historic “Intel inside” warning label. Somehow, “intel Leap Ahead” just doesn’t sound as good. They should really spend more of their cash on engineering a better product. Fancy logos, silly sayings, and glitzy packaging won’t ward off the big, scary monsters at AMD.

Toms has a review of Intel’s new Pentium Extreme Edition that is supposed to hit retail outlets today. IMHO, they have certainly improved the EE, but I still don’t think it beats the higher end X2’s. However, it looks like they may be headed in a better direction. The new EE and the 4800+ seem to split the benchmarks, but the X2 does it with far less power consumption.

My last peek at Intel’s roadmap showed that they were exchanging their MHz obsession for a parallelism obsession. Hopefully, someone from the engineering team managed to strangle the marketing guy who came up with that. It would be nice to see Intel engineering catch up to AMD and make the performance game more competitive. It would also be nice to see the AMD process catch up to Intel for the same reason.

… or at least that’s how it seems to those of us on the outside. An anti-spam advocate running for governor thinks it’s OK if he sends just a little. Apparently the guy (who we won’t give a free campaign ad to), believes that his unwanted emailed campaign ads are immune because they are “the truth". If we were lenient enough to allow mass-mailings that the sender said were “the truth", there wouldn’t be any need for anti-spam laws… all unwanted mass mailings would be the truth. Some people just never understand how stupid they sound.

Tom’s has a road map of future Intel chips on it’s page today. Once you get through the copious ads, you’ll probably get the feeling that Intel has traded it’s MHz obsession in for a multi-core obsession. Only the future will tell whether they have chosen the right path this time, or whether AMD will be able to capitalize on another mis-step.

Hopefully, Intel will bounce back enough to wake up AMD, but not enough to put them out of the competition. I’d like to see these two companies in a technology slugfest that lasts forever.

It looks like Sony’s legal troubles over their rootkit have begun in earnest. The State of Texas is suing Sony under it’s anti-spyware laws. This is the first credible lawsuit I’ve seen over this incident. There have, of course, been class-action suits filed, but those tend to be nuisance suits that are easily settled by giving a few lawyers some money.

Let the public flogging begin!

UPDATE:

If you need a little more info, check out Groklaw’s recent post on the same subject.

Sony may be in far more trouble than they think. It looks like the media player that they included on the XCP CD’s may have been snatched from the LAME encoder, which is covered by the Lesser Gnu Public License (LPGL). Even if it doesn’t result in a lawsuit, their violation of someone elses license would keep them from believably claiming that they are only looking out for someone’s copyright. If you want to check out the details, I first saw it in a Reuters article, then found more info from a post at dewinter.com.

If all of this is true, then Sony would have to make the source code and objects available to the public. Now THAT is what I call poetic justice!

So… I gather from the article that the Sony software is really LAME. Sorry, I couldn’t resist.

UPDATE:
If you’re not sure whether you have been infected by the Sony/BMG bug, the Electronic Frontier Fountation has published a Sony/BMG Spotter’s Guide.

Well, not really. But it got your attention, didn’t it?

It looks like there is a new weapon in the war on terror. An Israeli company recently tested an airport lie detector that is intended to catch anyone planning something illicit. Though I’m always glad to see a device that can make air travel safer, I’m a little worried about the potential for abuse of this device. One thing is almost certain: the day they start actually installing these devices, there will be a pretty nasty public debate.

Once again, we find ourselves looking at another ridiculous Sony DRM scheme. It looks like Sony and SunnComm have gotten together for more DRM fun. The SunnComm version seems to be a little less troublesome than the prior rootkit, but it still looks like spyware. It installs itself on your computer and transmits info about you without ever telling you what it is going to do. It also leaves 12MB of garbage around, even if you decide not to install it. It also seems that refusing to install it doesn’t stop it from running, it just stops it from re-running on the next boot cycle.

Could it be that Sony is getting informed that you refused to install their monitoring software for future legal action? Your guess is as good as mine. I would ask Sony, but I no longer trust their answers. I think that recent events justify that position.

More questions… Just how many copies am I allowed to make of a CD I legally bought? Am I allowed one at home, one at work, and one for each of my cars? what happens if I break or lose one? can I replace it? What happened to the concept of fair use?

I think that the most annoying of all of the big music assertions is that this is all done for the poor artist. If you want a view from one of the aforementioned artists, check out Janis Ian’s article “The Internet Debacle: an Alternative View” (you’ll need to scroll down in the left frame to find it). The most telling quote from it is this: “in 37 years as a recording artist, I’ve created 25+ albums for major labels, and I’ve never once received a royalty check that didn’t show I owed them money". Just exactly how much of this can be for the “poor artists"?

It looks like the high-tech politicians of the world have agreed to allow ICANN to continue administering the web. In the end, I really don’t see what the controversy was all about. The so-called demands for foreign language extensions is reasonable, but far from worth the fuss. There isn’t yet an example of a single time that the US has exercised any of it’s control of ICANN, and non-US applicants are not screened out.

Could it be more anti-American sentiment? I really can’t think of anything else… unless you count countries that want to screen all “objectionable” viewpoints from the Internet. Seems to me like those countries should just abandon the Internet in favor of the old fashioned bullhorn.

Apparently, Sony’s management has never heard the old adage: “when you find that you are in a hole, stop digging". Sony’s rootkit removal program opens the computer to attack from ANY web site. This is almost as bad of a security risk as mass-mailing your name and address to prison alumni.

I don’t know about anyone else, but this whole thing is beginning to make me nervous about other Sony products. If you can’t trust a high-tech company to know when they are seriously compromising the security of a computer, how can you expect to buy a laptop from them that doesn’t have pre-installed viruses? Once they resort to means as devious as the rootkit in the name of a few bucks, can you really trust anything they sell?

Unless you have been living in a cardboard box for the last few weeks, you have probably heard about the debates raging at the UN technology summit in Tunisia. It was billed as a chance for nations to get together and discuss strategies for spreading the Internet to developing countries. It has become everything but that.

How can you take a conference about freedom of speech seriously when it is being held in a country with an abysmal record in that area? I’m really not sure how much of the info coming out of the conference can be trusted when the host country is harassing foreign journalists and controlling the local ones.

The main topic has shifted, naturally, to the UN’s desire to take control of the Internet from ICANN. Yeah… that makes sense. Lets take it away from a non-profit organization run by people with a strong leaning toward free speech, and hand it over to an organization whose membership is more than half dictatorships and oppressive regimes. It wouldn’t be long before the UN would make all speech completely free… as long as it is anti-American or anti-Israeli.

The Internet is a wonderful mechanism for disseminating information that we cannot allow to fall into the hands of the ridiculous UN bureaucracy. Once it does, it won’t become a tool that is more accessible to developing countries as the UN promises. It will become nothing more than a tool used to oppress people. If you need evidence of the UN’s inability to do anything useful, just look at the bizarre and useless oil-for-food program.

Sony was warned that the rootkit-disguised-as-DRM that is shipping with it’s new CD’s was a huge security risk. Now it looks like someone already has an exploit for Sony’s controversial DRM package. I can smell the class-action suits ripening, and the all of the lawyers are walking around with little woodies.

I can’t say that I’d feel sorry for the perpetrators of this stupidity. Anyone dumb enough to take a multi-billion dollar risk to save a few million deserves to loose a lot of billions. Told Ya So-ny.

Apple has announced today a new IPod that will be video enabled. The video IPod will be approximately the same size as the current IPod, except a little thinner. It will come in two models: A 30GB model for $299 and a 60GB model for $399. Both will have a screen size of 320 x 240 pixels that support up to 260,000 colors, 20 hours of battery life, playback of H.264 and MPEG4 at 30 fps and TV output.

Apple plans to team up with ABC and DISNEY to provide TV broadcasts for the Video IPod. They have also announced that the device should be in stores by next week.

Personally I will stick to the PSP as my MPEG player of choice since I can get UMDs of most major movies, a higher resolution and everything in wide screen. If Apple somehow creates a way for me to connect DVDs or TIVO to the Video IPod then I may switch. Still… I hope this announcement will spur Sony into improving the PSP’s battery life and memory storage.

We have a winner in the DARPA Grand challenge! A VW Touareg finished the course in just under 7 hours yesterday, which is well within the 10 hours allowed. The fact that 5 vehicles finished the 132 mile race this year was a HUGE improvement over last year, when nobody got more than a few miles from the starting gate.

Congrats to the geeks of Stanford University, who have earned immortality in the minds of all Geekdom.

Tomorrow is the sequel to DARPA’s unmanned vehicle race. In last year’s contest, nobody won the $1M prize because nobody was able to cover more than 10 miles of the 150 mile course. That sounds like a cool contest to enter. Now if only I could get someone to pony up the $3M it would take me to win the $2M prize…

As a followup to my previous post, Intel’s CEO Paul Ottelini wimped out on AMD’s server CPU challenge. Booo! The fact that Intel doesn’t really have a dual-core server chip yet shouldn’t let chipzilla off the hook. I would love to see a challenge between the two chipmakers in any CPU arena. Let’s not limit things to dual-core servers… Lets enter everything!

It looks like AMD has challenged Intel to a dual-core server duel. Normally, AMD’s marketing department looks intellectually challenged, but this might just be a good move. While the spotlight is on Intel at IDF this week, they will be unable to dodge AMD’s challenge without serious damage to their rep. If Intel refuses, there really isn’t any excuse that will get them out of it. If they accept, AMD will most likely kick the chips out of them.

Though all of the experts seem to agree that AMD is a shoe-in for this one, don’t count chipzilla out. Nobody is really sure what they have up their sleeve yet.

I can’t wait to see how this one turns out.

Update:
Here’s AMD’s challenge in the form of a press release.

A house sitting robot named Roborior is now selling in Japan for the bargain price of approximately $2,600. It comes with IR sensors to detect break-ins, a cell phone link to notify the homeowner that he is getting robbed, and a cell phone camera to show him what he was robbed of.

If Roborior is able to prevent a major theft in your home, it might be worth the asking price. If not, it’s just one more expensive item to put on the long list that you give to your insurance company. (You DO have insurance, don’t you?)

A high school in Arizona has eliminated paper text books in favor of Apple laptops. It’s not just a statement about the advance of technology, but also one on how the notebook computer has become a commodity market. If you think about it, a single laptop issued to each student and loaded with electronic copies of textbooks is probably less expensive than a half-dozen paper textbooks per year for four years.

MacWorld is showing a picture of what they claim is the worlds first interactive 3D display. It looks like it could be a cool thing, but the company website is slammed, and I can’t get any more info. I’ll post as soon as I see something.

Anandtech has detected the presence of an ATI Radeon X800GT in the wild. The X800GT looks to be a competitor for the Nvidia 6600GT, though it is a touch more expensive. The shame about this is that the first one released is a Powercolor card. You probably won’t ever catch me buying another one of those. Yuck!

According to Reuters, Intel will be announcing a major philosophical shift at the next IDF. It’s about time! AMD had been stomping Intel in performance and efficiency for a few years now. This was triggered when AMD abandoned the MHZ wars in 2001 in favor of general quality. Since then, AMD CPU’s have consistently beaten Intel CPU’s in every category except Multimedia encoding/decoding.

It has taken a while, but it looks like even chipzilla can be trained. The announcement that new chips would be more like the Pentium-M than the P4 is no surprise. The P-M is far more efficient and stable than the aging P4 line.

How do you cause a geek to have mixed feelings? Show him a story about Microsoft winning a lawsuit against a spammer, even if it is technically just a settlement.

Geeks are almost universally anti-spammer. But then, who isn’t? A vast majority of geeks also believe that Microsoft has too big of a stranglehold on the software industry, and that handing them windfall profits from litigation is a bad thing. Hence the mixed feelings.

So… It’s lucky that Microsoft got this settlement. I was afraid that they wouldn’t make any profits this year, and that Redmond WA would become a ghost town. Yeah, right.

According to a Reuters article, Intel plans to build a new 3 billion dollar plant in Chandler, Arizona. The plant is scheduled to start churning out 45 nanometer parts in 2007. Intel’s willingness to invest such a a large amount of money in new facilities is a good omen for the MPU business.

According to this AP feed, TiVo is taking steps to encourage it’s users to watch commercials. That’s about as laughable as Google encouraging it’s users to “click through” on text ads. Everyone knows that the only time anyone clicks through is if they get an attack of spastic finger. The only reason that TiVo users would intentionally view an ad is if they suffer from temporary brain damage. Lets thank the TiVo marketing department for giving us our laugh for the day.

In a move that is sure to multiply the pressure on chipzilla’s legal department, EU competition officials raided several of Intel’s European facilities. Even though there have been rumors of dirty dealing, and a few investigations have been kicked off, the latest round of legal trouble was started by AMD’s recent anti-trust lawsuits against Intel.

I’m a little unsure what I think about this legal wrangling. AMD’s technology caught up to Intel around the time that the 1GHz Athlon was released. In recent years, AMD has pummeled Intel when it comes to performance, efficiency, and price, yet AMD has made no traction at all with large vendors. The whole situation smells really bad.

On the other hand, it all may be a case of social inertia. Big vendors may be stuck with Intel because joe everybody has no idea that AMD processors are that good. There is no sense in offering a product to the public if the public won’t buy it.

I guess I’ll just have to wait for the evidence like everyone else does.

… it could very well be. Earlier today, I stumbled across a theregister.com reference to a message about Dell’s customer support forums shutting down. When I followed the link myself, I saw something that said “The Message you are trying to access has been deleted. Please update your bookmarks". It also appears as though the forums are back up.

Normally, I would have expected to either see an apology by Dell about the confusion, or the original message that theregister.com saw. Instead I saw something that made me suspicious about both sides of the debate.

One thing I can say about Dell’s customer service… It’s about as bad as you can get. My own horror story involves a laptop that was waiting on an “unobtainable part", then was said to be lost, after which Dell questioned whether I had actually sent them a laptop. 3 months later, my laptop arrived… completely unannounced. All of my complaints were either met by the very same form letter (8 times), or an incomprehensible reply in broken English. I haven’t bought anything from them since.

According to Reuters, the creator of the Sasser worm got off with a suspended sentence in a German court. I guess the German courts don’t mind encouraging this kind of behavior in their teenagers. The punishment should be much more of a deterrent than a simple “I feel your pain". In my book, being a nerd with poor social skills is no excuse for causing millions of dollars worth of damage, even if you are only 17. Heck… most of the people I know fit that profile, including ME. None of them have ever committed a crime worse than downloading a movie.

So… To recap… A 17 year old kid intentionally created and refined a virus that is credited with more damage than any other. In the view of the court in his mother country, he was too young and too much of an a**hole to be held to the standards of law. Therefore, he is free to go back to his status of hero among his group of twisted anti-social virus-writing fans. No punishment is given, no reparations for any of his victims, and no real guarantee that he won’t do it again. Nice deterrent.

Verizon has signed a deal with Time Warner to carry it’s Turner Broadcasting stations on it’s new fiber-based FIOS network. To be clear about this: Most of us geeks don’t want the TV service (well, maybe a little), we want the 30Mb download link. So… When are you going to run fiber to my house? A couple of my friends have it, and I’m already Jealous!

So… do you think that the cable companies are sorry that they antagonized the telco’s by offering cable modem service? It looks like the cable guys might just have a little trouble dealing with the competition that they stirred up.

In a move that the US government should follow, The European Parlaiment voted down a proposed patent law that would standardize patents across Europe. It looks like the main sticking point involved the patenting of software.

Now if only we could get Congress to be a little more sane about the issue. The one-click shopping patent is atrocious, along with patents for methods of tying shoes. If we were to restrict patents to applied science and keep them out of the business space, we wouldn’t have people arguing that a background color was a business method, and therefore, deserving of a patent.

Intellectual property laws in this country were originally intended to allow the inventor/artist to take advantage of his own genius and allow him to earn back his development costs. Laws that were intended to encourage the little guy to strike out on his own have been twisted into something that protects big markets for the first big guy to win a lawsuit. The USPTO is long overdue for a major overhaul. Unfortunately, it won’t happen in the near future. As long as big companies are providing our lawmakers with their largest source of income, we’ll be stuck with the current situation. After all, what “honest” politician will tear up his own meal ticket?

The tech community lost another icon this week when Jack Kilby, inventor of the integrated circuit, died at age 81 on Monday. Though credit for the IC was often said to be shared with Intel founder Bob Noyce, Jack Kilby and TI held the official patent. In addition to the IC, Kilby went on to obtain a total of 60 patents, and has been credited with inventing the hand-held calculator.

Next time that you are fragging your buddies at a LAN party, or maybe when you reach into your pocket for a calculator to compute your waiter’s tip, give a thought to one of the men who was largely responsible for your ability to do so… Jack Kilby.

That burning sensation you get when using your laptop may not be something you need penicillin for. According to TheRegister.com, Fujitsu has recalled 250,000 laptop batteries because they could possibly overheat. I can only begin to speculate on how many jokes will float around the net about geeks with flaming laps.

As of today, interested Geeks can download the release version of Fedora 4 either straight from the Fedora download page or from one of the many Fedora mirrors. You can also get it from the torrent.

Among the new features of Fedora 4 are Gnome 2.10, KDE 3.4, and a preview of GCC 4.0.

The release of Fedora 4 comes on the heels of the announced separation of Red Hat and Fedora. Though I’ve seen lots of stories announcing the breakup, I haven’t seen any that actually talk about when it will happen, or even if it has already happened.

In what has to be one of the biggest computer hardware switcheroos of all time, Intel and AMD have completely switched market segments. This is based on the announcement that Intel has priced it’s new dual core CPU’s at half of what AMD has projected for the X2. It now looks like AMD is in the high-performance high-price category, while Intel has taken over the budget segment of the market. Now the ball is in AMD’s court. I’m hoping to see a nice price war start.

If you would have suggested a few years ago that this could happen, most IT people, me included, would have laughed at you. Color me amazed.

The Scooba, a robotic mop from the makers of Roomba, is due to be released to the gadget-loving public some time next year. Is it just me, or are there other people who are a little nervous about buying automated home appliances from a company called IRobot? I guess if they are like the Asimov book, we’re relatively safe. Lets just hope they aren’t like the completely unrelated movie.

With a wonderful flourish and an intensely passionate statement of the obvious, the US Senate passed a bill that declares spyware illegal. I’m not one to argue with Congress when they declare that crime is a criminal act, but I would really prefer if they would spend more time enforcing the fraud and privacy laws that covered this in the first place. To make a second law against the same thing seems like a waste of government money.

I guess that my only response would be a soft sigh and an unspoken DUH!.

Infineon if forming a team to explore a new type of computer storage called Phase Change Memory. In this type of memory, the material changes from amorphous to crystalline in order to store a 1 or 0. Sounds like a cool technology. We wish them luck.

… well, maybe not, but soon your gas company may be able to give you broadband. This Forbes.com article takes a look at the prospect of broadband-over-gas that is expected to roll out soon.

I think Forbes got one thing wrong: they expect that the fact that 85% of people have broadband available to them means that there is no market left. I disagree. That won’t happen until more than 90% of the population has a choice between broadband alternatives. Currently, many of us are stuck with choosing between an unreasonable provider and dial-up. If I had any choice in the matter, I would dump my current ISP for just about any other one out there.

Gizmodo is reporting that the geek quest of having Linux booting on anything is going strong. They report that the Nintendo DS is now capablable of booting to BASH prompt. Following onto the DSLinux.org site they say that you can play some text games as well. You definitely are a Shameless Geek to buy a dual display game system and then play text games. Go Geeks.

As reported by Reuters, many municipalities are embracing free, city-wide wireless connectivity in an attempt to patch up their poor broadband coverage. As expected, large telecoms and cable companies are lobbying for protective legislation that would stop the practice. Eweek has a related article.

I’m curious about why the companies would get so upset about seeing free wireless provided to areas that weren’t “cost effective” to cover. Well… not really, but I find it ironic. If they had actually provided the service, there would be no reason for the free wireless push. The municipalities would then have the option of taxing the broadband instead of watching their tax base wither as businesses migrated away from their low-tech towns. Seems like the free wireless push is poetic justice.

According to eWEEK, software startups have been recovering from their 5 year funk. This is really good news for us geeks, provided that it isn’t just wishful thinking.

Things are unlikely to return to the levels of the late 90’s, but most of us have to admit that the excesses of those days led to the abysmal job market of the last 4 years. I just want to go back to the days when changing jobs didn’t mean a pay cut, and you didn’t fear getting fired more than the company feared your resignation.

It’s official. Windows XP 64 started shipping today. There is also a free upgrade program for those who have 32-bit windows installed on a 64-bit machine. I wonder what Microsoft is going to do for those who buy Windows off-the-shelf to install on their home-brew machines? Seems like a bad idea to annoy their most loyal fans.

It seems as though the new dual-core CPU’s from AMD and Intel are causing a little bit of confusion for business software users. Some databases and financial software charge by the CPU core, meaning that some businesses may end up paying twice as much to run a program, even though it isn’t running twice as fast. Interesting problem. Lets see how these vendors get themselves out of this one. Obviously, Open Source doesn’t suffer from this problem.

As expected, AMD announced their dual-core lineup today. As with the Intel announcement last week: blah, blah, blah. I’m glad all of the “Me First” announcements are over, and that there are only a few more “Me Too” releases left.

The one bright spot in this announcement is AMD’s admission that it is holding off on a dual-core FX chips until games can take advantage of the technology. This is in direct opposition to Intel’s launch of a dual-core chip specifically aimed at gamers. Without a doubt, AMD’s approach is far closer to the real world. Early adopters of the dual-core P4EE are likely to find little to no improvement in the performance of games, if they don’t end up with a slight decrease due to slower clock speeds.

It looks like Server 2k3’s new service pack is causing the same headaches that XP SP2 did. I guess nobody would mind the breakage as much if they had finished fixing all of the back door problems. Oh well, I guess I should stop complaining. Most of the app breakage was likely the fault of lazy application programmers, not Microsoft.

If you are looking for Intel’s official press release of the dual-core P4EE, you can find it here. There really isn’t much new in it, except that Intel added a list of companies that are now selling systems with their dual core chips. Funny, as of last week, none of those companies knew when their systems would be available. In fact, all I could find were “Me Too!” press releases telling us of their intention to sell P4EE dual core setups.

The chips are probably just fine. The marketing is getting annoying enough to make me scream. When are these marketing weenies going to get the idea that they have super-saturated the market with half-true claims to the point where the frustration affects people’s opinion of the product?

Toshiba has announced a new flat panel 3D display technology that allows for much greater viewing angles and distances. They claim that objects appear to stand out several centimeters from the panel, even when viewed at a distance of 30cm or an angle of 30 degrees. Can’t wait until game makers can Really make those monsters jump out at you. Thanks to Slashdot for the pointer.

In yet another feat of “Market Engineering", Intel says it will begin shipping dual-core parts this coming Monday. Funny, but I seem to remember reading that they were already shipping. Check references here and here. So… what’s the truth? I trust the publications who put these online, I’ve never known them to intentionally mislead readers. So, who can I believe now?

This whole thing is beginning to annoy me. If you add the whacked-out release announcements to all of the “ME TOO!” market engineering releases by Dell, Alienware, and others, you end up with the geek version of the “Keystone Kops". Maybe the problem is that they have to keep all of those marketing armies employed somehow.

NVidia has posted their lates forceware version today. Get a copy here.. I don’t currently have an NVidia card to test it on, so I won’t be posting an opinion. I encourage anyone with first-hand opinions to post them here. Since I am likely to be purchasing one soon, I would be interested myself.

… or close enough. The Dell announcement was yesterday, but still suspiciously early. Intel announced today (see previous article) that they were shipping dual-core chips to customers. All of this is just before AMD’s anticipated announcement of a dual-core server chip, which may be just as non-existent as all of the other hardware mentioned here.

Did anyone else notice that there is no availability announcement on the Dell systems? That happens sometimes, but it is an exception to the rule, and is reserved for something that is still in the concept stage. Products that are in the final stages of development usually have, at the very least, a ‘fuzzy’ release date like “next month". Those of us in the engneering biz call concept releases “vaporware", and they are really just a “first-to-market” PR ploy that we should all get over.

It looks like we’re about to get another round of the “release game". Intel has announced that they are shipping
dual core P4EE’s a week before AMD is expected to announce their dual-core Opteron. The problem with the “release game” is that they tend to follow the same trend… Each company tries to one-up the other on releasing technology, causing them to rush the engineering cycle, then they forget to tell you that they can’t supply chips in quantity.

All of the major PC device manufacturers have fallen into this dirty little PR habit, not just Intel. AMD has done it in the past, and we just went through a major round of the same thing with Nvidia and ATI.

Intel may very well be planning to make this a “real” release as opposed to a “one-upsmanship” release, but color me skeptical. Before getting too excited about the prospect of a dual-core machine, I’ll wait until my favorite online store has them in stock.

Though ATI’s monthly Catalyst releases are not usually very noteworthy, they have billed this release as the first non-beta for XP-64. In addition, it looks like they updated the Linux driver as well. Now all I need is for Microsoft to release a non-beta XP-64, and I’m all set.

Sony has been granted a patent for a technology that beams sensory info straight into your brain. If this technology catches on, you’ll be able to smell the rotting corpses when you play Doom XIII.

Call me ungeeky, but I’m a little afraid to let anyone in my head like that. Besides, games are addictive enough without the digital equivalent of mainlining.

With a minimum of fanfare, AMD started shipping Athlon-64 chips equipped with the new Venice core today. Rumors around the net are also mentioning the imminent release of the 4200+ and the FX-57 in the near future. That’s good news for those of us waiting for the current generation of CPU’s to drop in price.

Nvidia has finally released a SLI chipset for Intel systems. I’m not yet sure that SLI is going to go over any better than it did for 3dfx all of those years ago. The motherboards and video cards are expensive, and game builders would be insane to offer games that didn’t still work really well on single GPU systems. Unless Nvidia can come up with a compelling reason to switch to a dual GPU, most of use can’t justify the expense.

Then again, I have been wrong before.

And that someone is Fujitsu. They are expected to come out with a 64 CPU version tomorrow. I guess the most remarkable thing about the whole story is that the Itanium ain’t quite dead yet. So how many 64 CPU servers do they need to sell to double Itanium sales for the year? I bet you could count them on your fingers.

For those of us who missed it last week, Toshiba announced a new rechargable battery that is capable of recharging at 60 times the rate of current lithium ion batteries. It can recharge itself to 80% capacity in less that 1 minute. Boring as it sounds, this is likely to be big news if the company releases the battery in 2006 as promised.

I wish I could recharge that fast. Can you imagine what life would be like if you could live on 1 minute of sleep per night?

Xilinx has added support for Linux to it’s downloadable web pack. Smart idea on their part. If you are geeky enough to want to play with FPGA programming, you are probably geeky enough to run Linux too. Too bad about support limited to 32-bits though. Real geeks already consider Athlon 64 a minimum system.

Oh… BTW, they updated the version for Windows too. Not sure why I forgot to mention that.

Three big movements at Microsoft since last night: Windows 2003 Server SP1 was released for download, Windows Server 2003 x64 Edition and Windows XP x64 Edition have been released to manufacturing. Otherwse stated, they have gone gold. The x64 Editions are expected to hit store shelves in late April. Finally, I’ll get the chance to see what Windows can really do for my Athlon 64.

TheRegister.com is reporting that a swedish XBox has blown up in it’s owners face. They also have published Microsoft’s response to their query about the solder joint theory. It seems inadequate to me too.

Regardless of whether Microsoft’s claims are true, I still believe that you should have your XBox looked over. Risking life and property over something as silly as who is right about whether a game has a serious design flaw seems a tad careless. Eliminate the risk, then complain to MS if you feel the need.

If, as Microsoft states, the solder joints are a warranty issue that only affects one in 10,000 units, are they willing to extend the warranty on the early XBoxes as a show of good faith? Will they resolder the power supply for free? It would be nice, but I wouldn’t hold my breath… or my power cord… until they do.

According to ExtremeTech.com, the new 64-bit P4’s actually hit the streets today, showing up in online price lists. Intel has not done much in the way of pushing the sale of EMT-64, probably due to their anti-64-bit rhetoric from AMD’s release in 2003. Intel’s assertion that 64 bits was an unnecessary luxury was pretty close to the mark. Unfortunately for them, the Athlon-64 turned out to be a better performing 32-bit CPU than the P4 as well.

A 64-bit CPU is a nice way to future-proof the purchase of a new PC, but I wouldn’t rush to upgrade a recently purchased system. So far, the only 64-bit support you will find is Linux x86-64 and Windows XP-64 beta. Unless you are a heavy Linux user or an early adopter of 64-bit Windows, then it is unlikely that the 64-bit extensions will actually make a difference to you. Of course, that story is likely to change as soon as XP-64 is released.

Could it be that Microsoft has been caught in a coverup? Thats the impression you get from the web these days. TheRegister.com recently published this article that points out some of the problems with the XBox cable recall. According to MANY sources on the web, the cord change is just a cheap liability limiting strategy. Speculation is that the real problem is a pair of faulty power supply solder joints that can crack, causing the connections to arc, thereby creating a fire hazard. You can catch a picture of the supposed bad solder joints on this forum. There is also significant confusion about who gets a new cord, and which cord they get. Apparently, all XBoxes older than version 1.4 (July 2003) get a cord with a GFCI (Ground Fault Circuit Interrupter) that will disconnect the cord from power if an overcurrent condition is detected. Everyone else will either get a standard replacement cord, or no cord at all.

Many of the online forums are recommending that users re-solder their power supply joints. Although I think their hearts are in the right place, I’m not sure where their heads are. I cannot recommend that a novice attempt to resolder the joints. There is something wrong with telling someone to purchase a cheap device that gets hot enough to melt lead, then touch it to their electronic equipment. The whole concept gives me the heebie-jeebies.

Recommendations:

1. Get the replacement cord. An inline GFCI won’t hurt anything, but may save your house if the XBox has a problem
2. Unless you have the proper training, don’t try soldering the joints yourself. A soldering iron in the hands of a novice can be a far greater fire hazard than a bad XBox
3. Get your unit checked by a technician. Any good tech will be able to make these repairs easily.
4. Complain loudly. If the problem is as bad as it seems to be, then Microsoft’s solution just a cheap patch. The number of complaints online indicate a serious design flaw.

Although Microsofts solution seems atrocious, we should remember that this kind of thing happens all of the time with consumer electronics. Take the case of personal CD players: It is very common for solder joints on the headphone jacks to crack, rendering the device unusable. In the case of the XBox, at least Microsoft decided to spare the house with a little insurance policy in the power cord. It aint a good solution, but its better than nothing.

So… The people who brought you IE made a piece of hardware with safety problems… Then applied a cheap and seemingly inadequate patch… and told you that there was never any real danger. Are you really suprised? I guess the only surprise is that they didn’t ask you to try a reboot first.

Here’s a really good article about the architecture of the Cell microprocessor. It goes into quite a bit of depth, and has a lot of refresher material about some current CPU technologies. If you are not familiar with the basic concepts of how a modern microprocessor works, you’ll probably get lost early on. If you “get” CPU’s, you’ll want to sit down, turn off the TV and the CD, and take some time to read this one.

Very nice job.

Viewsonic has announced ultra-fast 4ms LCD displays geared toward gamers. For the non-technical, the response time of a LCD monitor can be stated as how long it takes to change a pixel from one color to another. If your monitor is slow, it can make your picture look like it is smeared when you move quickly. Older models can take 30-40 milliseconds to change, which seriously degrades the quality of any picture with motion in it.

I’m pretty satisfied with how my 16ms Viewsonic LCD handles FPS games, so 4ms seems like overkill to me. However, I know some gamer geeks who are much pickier than I am.

AMD announced their new Turion-64 mobile CPU’s today. This appears to be the re-branding of the 90nm mobile Athlon 64 that everyone expected. One interesting note: the “more info” button on the Turion page points to this link, which shows pictures of AMD’s skywriting publicity stunt over IDF.

Once again, the Taiwanese police have seized a bunch of (allegedly) stolen AMD CPU’s frop Atop. This appears to be the same kind of thing that happened earlier this year. A batch of (allegedly) defective or sub-standard CPU’s gets earmarked for destruction, but magically re-appear at a Taiwanese outlet. Atop claims that the chips are second-hand, and that they came upon them legally.

Just to set your mind at ease, these are K7 and K8 chips that are at least 2 years old. Most geeks shy away from anything that obsolete

I’ve been waiting for Intel’s response to Japan’s FTC assertions about monopolistic trade practices. Well, Chipzilla has finally spoken, and it appears to me that they still haven’t said anything.

Personally, I’m a fan of AMD CPU’s, but I don’t see Intel as a giant who has been winning the war using unfair practices. Aside from the rumored threats to OEM’s in the late 90’s, I can’t see how Intel has really done a whole lot to crush other manufacturers aside from promoting their own products. They don’t have to. An uninformed public tends to do that job for them without any legal risk.

Found on Slashdot today: a break-in challenge from Linuxense. It’s just a bragging rights challenge… no cash prize. They will be putting a “generic” Linux box online without a firewall, and they are challenging the Linux / Security community to try breaking in.

Obviously, it is part of some type of publicity stunt. If the system stays up, we’ll be hearing all about how “robust” (dontcha hate that buzzword) someone’s Distro/app is. Details are sketchy at best, with no mention of which distro, apps, or security software are on it. If the machine is successfully broken into, we will probably never know any of the details of the system. It is also unlikely that the owners will publicize the name of anyone who might break in. Still interested? Follow the link at the beginning of this article. (Hint: if you don’t know how to do that, don’t bother entering the contest)

Adidas is about to announce their new microprocessor-controlled running shoes. I’m guessing they are trying to find a way to make us geeks care about running. That depends… Can you run faster if you overclock the CPU?

I can just see it now… an all new set of excuses for runners… “Yeah, well, I would have outrun you if my sneakers hadn’t crashed". “I think I may have burned up a heel". “NO NO NO! Take your feet out before you turn the shoes off”

All-in-all, I think I’ll just wait for the eXpress version to come out.

Somebody please stop me before I pun again…

AMD may not have the top slot in the chip industry, but you gotta hand it to them for their sense of humor. Apparently, this skywriter’s banner was reportedly seen in the skies around the Intel Developers’ Forum. For the uninitiated, Turion is AMD’s mobile CPU chip, which is in direct competition with Intel’s Pentium-M. I have no idea whether this is a hoax or not… If it is, it’s a good one. If not… it’s still a good one.

Thanks to AnandTech for the pointer.

As expected, the Intel Developer Forum (IDF) has brought with it a bumper crop of new chip announcements. Hang on, and I’ll try to get you up to speed without crushing your brain.

Intel has dropped the Vanderpool name in favor of Intel Virtualisation Technology (VT) to describe it’s one-chip, multi-OS technology. Not the most poetic name, but very descriptive. In addition, the next generation of CPU has changed names from Smithfield to Pentium D. These will be the first of the dual-core Pentiums to come out later this year.

Pentium D will not support Hyper-Threading, meaning that the dual-processor nature of the Pentium D will not be enhanced to look like 4 processors. You will need to get the Extreme Edition (EE) for that. It’s OK by me. Everything I do runs slower with Hyper-Threading turned on anyway. The Pentium D WILL support EMT-64, which is Intel’s clone of the AMD 64-bit extensions. That part is good.

There will be two Centrino-like desktop platforms released, one each for home desktop and office desktop. These chipsets have been dubbed “Desktrino” online, but I don’t know if that is an official Intel name.

The Xeon MP will ship in Q1 of 2006, for those of you who care about servers.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, Intel is hinting at a 64-bit Celeron this year. I really don’t know why they’ll bother. Why put 64-bits in something that shouldn’t even be used in a calculator?

Not to be outdone, ATI announced two new graphics chips. The first is the RADEON X300 SE. If you are looking to upgrade your on-board video (slightly), you already have a PCI-E motherboard, and you don’t mind your video card using a big chunk of your system RAM, then this is the card for you. You can keep it too… I don’t want it. ATI’s second release today was the the ES1000, which is geared toward lower power dissipation for servers.

ALSO:
Microsoft is talking about releasing XP-64 within a month WooHoo! s’about time!

UPDATE:

TheRegister.com has corrected a previous article where readers may have gotten the impression that VT would appear in the Pentium D first. Curiously, I didn’t repeat that here, but I linked to the original article. In any case, you have the correction.

On the same day that AMD demonstrated dual-core Athlon 64’s, Dell says NO to AMD again. Of course I predicted it. Everytime AMD does something new, Dell talks about including AMD’s in it’s product line. Every time that happens, they change their mind back. It’s not hard to speculate as to why this is.

We know that Dell has paid for this relationship by losing all credibility with gamers and enthusiasts. I hope that Intel hasn’t been paying too much to keep Dell. Neither of them have much chance of regaining their standing with real computer geeks for a long time to come.

Update:
One noteworthy thing about this announcement: it is nice to see a demo announcement that does not claim that the new product is all things to all people. Hidden down near the bottom of this press release is AMD’s recognition that dual-core chips won’t benefit gamers in the near term. Hopefully, others will begin to follow this lead and be a little more truthful in their advertising. Well, OK. I guess I’m not that gullible either.

ATI intends to give users a peek at their new 512 MB cards at a gaming festival in Dallas this week. Look for nVidia to announce the release of a 512 MB card tomorrow… No, I don’t have inside information, It’s a prediction based on historical data.

I like one guy’s comment… he’s still waiting for a sneak peek at the X800XL that supposedly shipped 2 months ago.

My favorite PSU and case maker, Antec, has a new line of PSU’s, according to this AnandTech article. My last 2 Cases and PSU’s were Antec. My next probably will be too.

AMD and Intel are both announcing 64-bit server chip releases this week. Both companies will be offering features that cut back on power consumption based on demand. I’ve worked with AMD’s PowerNow! technology for the Athlon-64, and found it useful, but not overly so for a desktop machine. In the case of a server, it would help immensely. I’m assuming that Intel’s technology is similar.

On a related note, AMD cut prices on the majority of their product line on the heels of the new releases.

LinuxDevices.com has the story of how Wind River Systems has migrated to Linux. It doesn’t look like they have abandoned their old flame altogether though. They are also offering middleware to help with IPC between Linux and VxWorks.

Once upon a time, VxWorks was king-of-the-hill in the realtime and embedded OS space. Unfortunately, the high price of their stuff had no chance of competing against the ever increasing quality and availability of embedded Linux. Their OS performed well, but the same features that made it blazing fast, also made it an easy trap for bad programmers to get caught in. Once upon a time, having a lot of VxWorks experience looked good on a resume. *sigh* Times change.

Here is the ulimate geek toy for your Gameboy Advance SP. Someone has created a device that allows you to monitor your cars performance using a Gameboy Advance SP.

Catalyst 5.2 is now available on ATI’s driver download page. It doesn’t look too interesting unless you have a X700 or better card. Since I’m stuck with a 9600 pro for the forseeable future, I’ll probably skip this one. I’m still waiting for an apology for the 9600, as well as an x86_64 linux driver that doesn’t crash X.

But I’m not holding my breath.

The news about the Cell CPU is out. You can check out C-Net Wired or AnandTech for details.

Once again, we have a chip that is supposed to dethrone the X86 as the king of the PC. I wish them all of the luck in the world, but I’ll remain skeptical. Remember that even Intel’s much publicised x86 replacement Itanium (now known as the Itanic in some circles) failed miserably. We’ve also seen the Crusoe, the PowerPC, and others fall by the wayside over the past 25 years.

If Windows gets ported to it quickly, and popular PC games are written for it, then the Cell has a chance. If not… I’m afraid we’ll see another ugly post-mortem in a few years.

Intel has announced dual core production ahead of previous schedules. I’m not going to get too overjoyed yet… I was excited about HT technology, which turned out to be a real bust. I find that Windows and Linux both run faster with HT turned OFF! This includes a 50% increase in framerate in CS:Source.

One warning about the AnandTech article though… It states that a dual HT chip can process 4 threads simultaneously. That isn’t quite true. It can keep track of 4 simultaneously, but it only has 2 complete pipelines.

HT can be more efficient if you have multiple threads that need to share the CPU somewhat equally, but it can slow down threads (like game rendering engines?) that expect to get all or nearly all of the CPU’s attention.

Dual core systems can significantly increase throughput, but not in all cases. The very first concern is whether the OS can efficiently divide things up between processors, and the very last one is whether an app takes advantage of multiple CPU’s. Dual cores are likely to have little advantage in the short term, but will probably get more useful as time goes on.

In a letter to Microsoft Customers, Bill Gates promised to work harder to make his company’s software work better with existing systems. What really needs to happen is for MS to release it’s proprietary formats so that existing software systems can work better with MS software. Are you game for that Mr. Gates?

How’s this for Mega Geekware? These MP3 glasses are cool enough that they could even convince me to listen to MP3. The convenience and cool factor could outweigh the low quality of compressed music.

How about a pair of Bluetooth glasses that pump in high quality audio from the CD player? Or putting some video on those lenses?

Thanks to Specialst for the pointer.

Remember SunnComm? That company who made the most HILARIOUS booboo in software history? The DRM app that could be circumvented by holding the shift key down? THEY’RE BACK! Check out this article at TheRegister.com for the story.

If a company is reckless enough to release a product like that in the first place, then compound the error by filing a lawsuit that calls attention to their blunder, would you take them seriously?

A DRM scheme that blocks copying but still plays in old CD players is never going to be secure. A simple LINE-OUT to LINE-IN patch cable gets around that. If you’re looking to hack it while it’s still digital, look at sound card filter drivers. Any way you slice it, this kind of DRM is meant to keep the general public from making backup copies, but does ABSOLUTELY NOTHING to stop the pirates they claim to be chasing. The only thing this technology does is to keep honest people honest… and that doesn’t require DRM.

Now that I’ve stated the common sense of the subject, is there a lawsuit in my future?

Tom’s has posted their 2004 Readers Choice Awards. It’s not surprising that AMD’s Athlon 64 got the award for best CPU innovation. The surprising thing is that it won by a 7:1 margin! Obviously, we geeks have been paying attention. Another notable thing is that ATI walked away empty handed. This is furher evidence of their decline this year. Lets hope they make up for it in 2005. Consumers need the competition.

AMD’s processor market share increased to 16.6% according to this ExtremeTech article. I’ve been a fan of AMD CPU’s since I got my first 500MHz Athlon at work. The one Intel-based desktop that I bought since turned out to be a disaster. Go AMD!

MS and Belgium have teamed up (?) to integrate electronic ID cards with MSN Messenger. Slashdot has some reactions. Just lovely. Now Belgians get the chance to have their EID exposed to IM hackers.

This sounds like the premise for a really bad SCI-FI movie where a mega-company run by a meglomaniac gets complete control of everybody’s identity, and erases all memory of those who get in the way. Sound familiar?

ExtremeTech has this announcement of VIA’s new chipsets for the P4 and Athlon-64. I was once a VIA detractor, but I’ve been using an Athlon-64 Mobo with one of their chipsets for about 9 months, and it has turned out to be one of the most dependable and smooth-running machines I’ve ever had. My VIA based P4 is a completely different story. It’s troubles wouldn’t fit on the front page of a ‘blog like this.

In this CNet News article, Microsoft officially announces what has been rumored for months. Pirates will not be getting security updates. Though I agree with the concept in principle, it will leave a lot of virus generating machines out there. Microsoft may want to re-think their responsibility in this matter. They decided to run an OS on RPC’s (something that makes programmers cringe), shouldn’t they clean up the mess?

It seems that Nvidia is catching up to ATI. I can see why. I’ve been an ATI fan for years. My last 4 video cards were ATI’s. But after my experiences with the 9600 Pro, I’m going to be a little slow to choose ATI next time.

Bought one of these cards as a gift for my kid. No Video. Put it in a different machine. Windows works great, Linux doesn’t. Put it in a third machine, and I get intermittent crashes on CS:Source. If it weren’t for the fact that I can get all of the features to work in at least one machine, I would say it was a hardware fault. I can’t blame the 9600 Pro chip, because I have an ATI 9600 Pro in my machine that has performed admirably for over a year. No, the Powercolor doesn’t work in this one either.

I tried 2 different versions of catalyst, omega drivers, all of the settings in both positions, AGP voltage adjustments, and every other wacky remedy I found on the web. No change. Stripped the OS, reformatted, and rebuilt. Still no go. I’ll be sending it back ASAP, but I thought people would want to know about this turd. Based on what I see on the wild, wild web, I’m not the only one to complain.

I like telling you about good experiences I have with hardware. I feel that it is my duty to also tell you about the bad.

Update:
I’ve upped the AGP voltage to 1.8V. Thats a 20% increase, and it is in the realm of scary things to do to your system. It seems to have stopped the crashes that happen during normal Windows stuff. I haven’t been able to test the card under load yet. I’ll post results when I have them.

Update 2:
The voltage increase has stabilized the system significantly. It made the system stable enough for me to figure out (by process of painful elimination), that I also needed to turn the bus speed down to 4x and turn fast writes off. This makes it perform just slightly better than the 9100 it replaced. Just to be fair, I swapped in my ATI Radeon 9600 Pro (I think they are made by Sapphire), and found that I could run with AGP 8x. Sounds like, whatever the problem is, Powercolor is much worse.

Speculation: There is a serious power problem with the 9600. It demands something that is at the limit of what many motherboard / power supply combinations can provide on a single AGP connection. The fault can easily be spread between the makers of the power supply, the chip, the AGP card, and the mobo. Any one of these can be a little lax about the impedances of the power supply rails, and POOF! endless hours of fun. My mobos (both MSI NEO series) have voltage adjustments for AGP that helped solve the problem. Those who don’t have luxuries like that could easily end up replacing their power supply and motherboard without fixing the trouble. It’s a really bad deal.

In the end, though, the finger should be pointed at ATI. It was probably quite obvious to them that this kind of problem existed (if it wasn’t… that’s an even worse thought). When they noticed it, they should have added an alternate power supply connector to their reference design. I’m guessing that some marketing genius decided that an extra power connector took away from the “mid-range experience” or some hopelessly vacuous bean-counter decided that the extra power connector was too expensive. Either way, it has made me decide that, even after being a loyal ATI customer for my last 4 cards, I’m going with NVidia next time. ATI has a lot to prove to me now.

I have invited ATI’s PR department to respond. Any bets on whether they will?

Update 3:
I reproduced the problem with an ATI branded 9600 Pro card. Though the problem was much less frequent, it still occurred. I guess it is safe to point a finger at ATI for this one. In addition, I’m not the only one with these problems. A quick search of the web will find you thousands.

By the way… ATI never answered. Go figure.

I know this isn’t exactly hard news, but TheRegister (among others) is printing what we all have been hearing as rumors lately. Mostly that Intel plans formal launches of both the new x86-64 line and a dual-core line. Check the link, and take it with “a grain of salt". Hopefully, these launches won’t be as bad as the vaporware GPU’s launched lately.

ATI has released a whole bunch of driver software for me to download. This includes a update of
Catalyst 5.1 for XP and a whole new x86_64 driver for Linux. Happy days for me!

This article about yet another marriage of rat parts to nanotechnology, is another one to add to the list of vaguely scary scientific advances. You have to wonder if this one is science fiction. After all, it is a BBC article

Can anyone out there tell me why it is always rat parts that they use? First rat brains flying F-22 simulators, now rat hearts powering miniature robots. Haven’t these scientists ever heard of a cockroach?

I’ve just finished the first draft of a Geeks guide to AMD’s Cool’n'Quiet feature. I intend to make this the first in a series of original tech submissions. If anyone has any ideas about what subject I should poke my nose into next, let me know.

Found a couple of links to the release of the Turion today, but they all seem to point back to this page at TheRegister.com. It seems as if nobody really knows about what the Turion is beyond ’some kind of Centrino competitor’. One thing is clear: AMD really needs to upgrade it’s marketing department.

Found a link on /. to this discussion of Intel and AMD’s plans for the near future. Sound a bit like AMD is looking to do a bit more marketing. Thats just fine, as long as they don’t make the consumer pay for it. Yeah right! Like that’ll ever happen!

Can’t blame them though. If you can get other people to pay for your marketing, and it makes your company grow, why wouldn’t you do it?

Samsung is showing off a prototype OLED display. To the uninitiated, OLED is an acronym for Organic Light Emitting Diode. The cool thing about OLED’s is that they create a very sharp picture with contrast ratios in the 5000 range, as compared to LED’s which range between 200 and 500. The uncool thing about them is that they have a very short lifespan. They tend to lose brightness 3 - 4 times as fast as regular LED’s.

According to this article at informationweek, Adobe has released a new version of Acrobat that allows a publisher to include DRM locking in a document. As usual, you can download the free Windows version of Acrobat reader. This site also has a link to an application to enter the Linux beta program.

Check out thisBest Of list out at TechReport. At the very least, you’ll want to know who got the middle finger award. I’m not sure I agree with all of their choices for winners, but I certainly agree with the last one

I saw all of the headlines about counterfeit AMD CPU’s yesterday, but this article at TheRegister.com seems to say that they were actually bad chips marked for disposal. I guess we’ll all need to look suspiciously at any cheap CPU’s coming out of Asia for a while.

AnandTech has a look at running Linux on Intel’s Dothan processor. Some of the results are surprising. This Pentium-M variant looks to have a bright future in the blade server market. It’s expensive, but it runs cool. It ahieves competitive performance with much lower power requirements and therefore, much lower cooling requirements. It is a good choice for a server, but it seems a poor choice for gamers (for now).

AnandTech has gotten an OTS 1GB DIMM with standard air cooling to run at DDR2-821. If you are thinking about upgrading your Intel system to a 925XE, you want to check this one out.

The guys over at Toms Hardware are running a live stress test of AMD and Intel systems. Looks like the biggest problem they have had is with the power supply. I guess we know which one of those NOT to buy . I’m not quite clear on whether the 2 reboots shown for the Intel system correspond to the 2 power supply problems or not. Doesn’t matter whether you are and Intel or AMD fan. Check out the live geek show!

Well, we all could have predicted it, though most of us didn’t. Two GPU’s on one card. Tom’s Hardware has this preview of Gigabyte’s dual-GPU graphics card. According to the article, the dual card is supposed to beat nVidia and ATI’s best single GPU cards, but at a lower price. It accomplishes this by using 2 mid-priced GPU’s for the job. One question they didn’t answer: How much power? Oh well, I guess a state-of the-art graphics card that gets really hot is a geek’s dream anyway. After all, it can render your FPS at an incredible speed and resolution, while cooking your Hot Pocket at the same time! Geek Heaven!

ATI has released version Beta3 of the 64-bit Catalyst driver. That’s nice, and I appreciate the effort, but I would like to see a driver that works with a recent Linux distro. Love the hardware, hate the attitude toward open source. It would be a shame if this had to influence my next graphics card purchasing decision (hint, hint).

Over 10 Million intelligent consumers have made the switch to Firefox. It’s easy to see where our loyalties lie here… It’s written all over our pipe! If you haven’t made the switch yet, I would urge you to click on the link above, or just go to www.mozilla.org. I use Firefox at home and at work, on both Linux and Windows. Since I switched, Spybot and Ad-aware have detected far less spyware on Windows. In fact, the only time I ever found any critical objects was when my Wife visited e-bay with MSIE. Since I converted her, I haven’t had any critical objects at all! Believe me… It’s well worth the effort.

Matsushita Electric of Japan is about to release a new type of battery that lasts 1.5 times as long as a regular alkaline. Rabbit stew anyone?

According to TheRegister.com, Intel has demo’ed its dual-core 65 nm Yonah CPU. It isn’t expected to ship until sometime in 2006, but at least it isn’t ‘vaporware’ anymore. I guess you could call it ‘notyetreadyware’.

News.com reports that Intel is now talking about releasing 64-bit P4’s some time in 2005. This coincides with the M$ announcement of 64-bit Windows in the same time period. I’m glad to see the 64-bit world push forward, but I’m a little concerned about the timing of everything. The main question is: who was waiting for whom? There have been beta versions of 64-bit Windows available for about a year, and Intel claims to have the circuitry for 64-bits already in the guts of the P4. Can anyone think of a reason why either company would hold back that doesn’t involve illegal business practices? M$ could easily have thrown 64-bit Windows versions that support Opteron and Athlon 64 on the market long ago. With all of the other 64-bit OS’es out there, Intel had no reason to hold back on 64-bit hardware. It all smells fishy to me.

M$ is closing in a 64-bit Windows release according to CNet. The biggest news is that they intend to allow those of us with 32-bit versions to upgrade to 64-bit versions for free! Whoopee! Well, given MicroSlow’s track record, I’ll reserve comment till it actually happens. It might even soften the blow from their decision to let Win2k virus carriers to go unpatched.

On the heels of the spectacularly popular Firefox browser, Mozilla has released their companion email client Thunderbird 1.0. I’ve been using old versions of Thunderbird (0.8 and 0.9) for a while now, and I highly recommend them. I even got it to work with an Athlon 64!

Tom’s Hardware is reporting that LCD panel prices dropped by about 1/5 in Q3, and are expected to drop by another 1/5 during Q4. Hello? does this mean that me and the other financially challenged geeks of the world can finally afford to get rid of the flickering VGA monitor soon?

AnandTech has a nice, longwinded article about AMD vs. Intel on dual CPU database servers. Once again, AMD wins on overall performance and bang-for-buck. Even if you aren’t interested in database servers, you might want to check out some of the analysis in this article. It makes a good attempt to explain why some features help performance, and why others just cost money.

Must be a slow news day again. Just about everyone on the web has a post about the new ATI X850 release. It looks like a wonderful card that is a slight step up from the X800. Unfortunately, it’s not any closer to my price range. You can find reviews at The Register.com, FiringSquad.com and AnandTech.com. AnandTech also has a list of reviews from around the web. Enjoy.

Just to let you know, I haven’t given up on putting pointers to interesting tech news stories in this blog. It’s just that there doesn’t seem to be any tech news worth telling! If you’ve been under a rock: There are security problems with Windows. The windows guys and the Linux guys don’t get along, SCO is still a lawyer pit that suffers regular DDOS attacks. RIAA is still trying to convince us that P2P is making them poor despite several consecutive years of record-breaking profits. AMD is still kicking Intel’s butt, but Intel sells more chips. ATI and Nvidia have cool new competing video chips that nobody can seem to buy. SLI is still too expensive for the sane. I’ll bet I haven’t told you anything that you didn’t know. I’ll pass along anything new I happen to stumble across.

Hexus.net has a pretty good overview of SLI for those of us too rushed for the detailed tutorial. You’ll also find some good, honest opinions on what is missing. I’m looking forward to the rest of the series… as well as ATI’s return of serve.

Here is todays SLI announcement from AnandTech. If you’re like me, you have been waiting a while for NVIDIA to catch up to ATI. If you want a bit more than just a press release, check out the Asus web page. I can’t wait for the reviews. I expect that the reviewers will be all over this one.

Here’s AnandTech’s take on the new Gigabyte K8NXP-9 board. If this is an example of the performance we can expect from the new crop of Athlon 64’s, I can’t wait to see whats next!

ATI has released version 4.11 of the Catalyst driver. Looks like the biggest fix is a performance upgrade for 256 MB cards. Still, it’s always nice to have the latest version of stuff.

InfoWorld is reporting that Dell amd AMD are talking about a deal …again. If you’ve been following these two companies over the last few years, it seems that this happens every time Dell and Intel have a contract about to expire. It would be wonderful news if it happened, but I’ll just assume it is yet another attempt by Dell to squeeze a better deal out of Intel. Some things never seem to change.

Intel is updating its Itanium line again. The 2 most notable parts of this article are the 9MB cache, and the $4k+ price tag. Anyone wonder why it didn’t float?

Adding to the flurry of Open Source releases, the Mozilla Project released their official 1.0 version of Firefox today. I tried accessing the page via various links, including the one at the top of this site, but it appears that their servers are overwhelmed. I personally recommend Firefox. I’ve been using it exclusively for Windows and Linux since version 0.9, and I’m impressed. That doesn’t happen often. If you want a copy, you know where to find it (Hint: scroll up).

Looks like a bumper crop of Linux releases. Novell has released their Linux Product, described by many as a scaled down version of Suse. Check it out Here. Good to see another competitor enter the Linux arena.

As promised, RedHat has released Fedora Core 3 today. Some of the reported enhancements include kernel 2.6.9, Gnome 2.8, KDE3.3, Evolution 2.0, Firefox 1.0PR, and Thunderbird 0.8. It might be worth waiting a few days until the crowd of downloaders thins out a little. I noticed a download for a rescue cd that is only available for the i386 architecture. I’d be interested in finding out what that is about.

Not exactly a revelation, but very good news for fans of the Athlon-64 chips. The news is all over the net, and you can find lots of early reviews everywhere. If you just want an executive view, check out TheRegister.

Mozilla has announced the release of Thunderbird 0.9. Check out the release notes Here .Use the link on the page to download. I’ve been using it on some of my systems for a while, and I like it. I’ve run into occasional annoyances with the Linux versions, but far fewer that you would expect from a sub-1.0 version.

EWeek is reporting that IE is losing market share. It’s about time someone started pushing them out. Despite major security problems, they haven’t released a new version in 3 years.

TheRegister.com is reporting that ATI is well along on their R5xx cycle, and that the new chips should be out in the first half of next year. Maybe that will convince me to upgrade.

The Register is reporting that Intel will launch its 1066 FSB front side parts this week. If you want a good look at the actual performance improvement, Anandtech has a comparison in their report The improvement seems somewhat marginal, especially at the price for an upgrade. I think I’ll stick with my AMD-64 3200+ for a while.

I’ve added a tech news category for general discussion of… tech.