Shameless Words from Shameless Geeks

It looks like E2 2007 will be substantially smaller than previous expo’s. I guess it was bound to happen. When a trade show gets so big that it starts scaring away visitors, it’s time to re-think the whole idea. Plus… if they break it up into smaller shows, it will give us more to talk about throughout the year.

I wonder if LeakeNova will be going there for vacation in 2007? Naaaahhhh!

Mozilla Corp is patching 13 major Firefox flaws via it’s auto-update facility. Judging by the look of the flaws, I would advise everyone to allow the update to happen. The update takes Firefox to version 1.5.0.5, and fixes some rather nasty cross-scripting vulnerabilities. If this one doesn’t happen automagically for you, then I would advise going to www.mozilla.com and updating manually.

Kind of a twist to see Firefox with critical vulnerabilities. I guess Microsoft is becoming a reasonable alternative to Firefox after all

James Doohan, Star Trek’s “Scotty", is scheduled to be posthumously launced into orbit in October. The announcement comes after delaying last year’s attempt to launch his remains. Seems like a fitting way to dispose of the body of someone who, despite being an actor, inspired many of this country’s top engineers, and probably helped to push the space program as well.

Slate has posted an article about the sad tragic death of collecting baseball cards. Sadly it is not just baseball cards that suffered a similar death, so have comics for about the exact same reasons. At their current state I don’t think both are going to be around in 20-30 years. So for all you guys polybagging, slabbing and boarding your comics and cards, stop it comics and baseball cards are worthless.

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.

OK. Microsoft has publicly promised to “play fair” with other software and software vendors. Please excuse me while I snicker a little.

It sounds like the Beast of Redmond has some lofty goals, but I doubt that they will amount to anything more than lip service. If they really intended to do anything about it, you would be able to go to a major computer disty (like Dell) and order a computer without Windows for LESS that you would pay for one that has it. End of story.

I’m sorry, but Microsoft has a huge amount of bad behavior to overcome before anyone will start believing in their promise of good behavior. There are too many Netscape examples out there to believe what they have to say.

I’m still waiting to find out what the Advantage part of Windows Genuine Advantage is. Is it the Advantage of someone using my system to beta test spyware? If Microsoft has this kind of definition of the word Advantage, Just exactly what is their definition of Fair?

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.

In a recent interview IBM VP Tom Reeve dropped a hint that the yields on the Cell processor for Playstation 3’s are about 20%. He also stated that the Cell will only have 7 slaves and could drop to 6, which is different from the 8 that Sony said it would have. Hopefully, Sony planned on the low chip yields or there are going to be serious shortages of PS3s this Christmas. This may also explain why Sony delayed the launch of the PS3 from Spring till the last quarter. Still… with poor performance, low yields and a hard to program chip, is the Playstation 3 going to worth the $600 price tag? Guess we will have to wait and see.

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It looks like The US State dept. believes it was hacked by the Chinese military last month. This would make warfare a whole new ball game. As people get more and more dependent on computers and the Internet, hacking will become more and more effective as a strategy for taking out competitors. It may even be possible soon to cripple your enemy so badly that he surrenders without anyone firing a single shot.

I really hope we have a way to respond to this.

Toms Hardware (the dark-side ad purveyor) has an article about the current state of Linux game graphics. If you can stand all of the blinking and flashing commercial annoyances, the article is worth reading. If not, here is the gist:

• Linux drivers work a lot better than they did last year
• Nvidia is much more Linux friendly than ATI
• Frame rates for UT look to be VERY playable
• They didn’t do a direct comparison between Linux and Windows

Games and office applications are two of the biggest reasons why the average consumer would buy a computer. As support for these increases, it is very likely that Linux adoption will increase as well. Hopefully, that will lead to a day when somebody (anybody… Linux, MacOS, whoever) is enough competiton for Microsoft to turn them back into an honest company. I’m really getting tired of a monopoly dictating how I can use my computer simply because they are too big to stop.

Firefox usage has increased to 15% in the US, 12% worldwide. The really good news is that adoption is starting to pick up speed again after a long period of stagnant growth. It’s clear that Firefox as a product is more than competitive with IE. Now all we can do is hope that it will someday be a true market competitor.

Today was officially the last day of support for Windows 98, Windows 98 Second Edition (SE), and Windows Millennium Edition (ME). I have fond memories of 98 SE, but the others were pretty doggy. I’m really not sad to see any of them go.

Next on the list is XP SP1, which is scheduled to go away in October. XP SP2 support will not stop until 12 to 24 months after the early 2007 release of Windows Vista.

USAToday is running a story that is essentially a commercial advertisement for the upcoming Call of Duty 3. It gives a little insight into what the developers are doing to advance the technology of portraying WWII.

Actually, I’m not doubting that COD3 will be released. I’m just wondering whether I will be in a rush to buy it. I was one of those who was extremely disappointed by the anti-cheat support in CoD2. The game itself was OK, but I bought it primarily so that I could play online… I even attempted to run a public server. Unfortunately, the cheating was so rampant that I gave up and took down the server. When they finally got around to fixing the problem, I had already lost interest.

I seriously hope that they will pay attention to the online gaming community this time.

Researchers proved today in a study that Mushrooms can get you high. I think my old college roommate says it best, DUH!!!!

This ElReg story about Master Card’s re-branding efforts shows that we are not descended from apes, but from the useless third of the population of Golgafrincham. All hail Fintlewoodlewix! I dare you to read through the article without either giggling or snoring.

I stumbled across this story about a bear cub eating pizza and drinking beer while sitting in a vintage convertible. I suspect that men and women have different reactions to the same story. Men will generally react with “sounds like a pretty good Sunday afternoon to me". I suspect that women will wonder why he/she wasn’t visiting his/her mother. The picture is conclusive proof that men are nothing more than bears with furniture (and convertibles).

I’ll bet you’ve never seen a case like this before: an electrician in India lost a large chunk of his skull a few months after his head was badly burned in an accident. Literally, he’s become a numbskull.

If the same thing happened to me, I could become the worlds first human planter. Maybe a nice fern….

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.

It looks like The Beast of Redmond has been hit with another annoyance in it’s plan to take over the world. Microsoft was slapped with a second lawsuit over the behavior of WGA.

Once again, Microsoft claims that WGA is not spyware, and that it is there to help the consumer. By law, they have every right to lie about the purpose of their software. Unfortunately for them, the most insanely profitable company in the world will get very little latitude in the public eye. Does anyone remember when Microsoft promised that their XP licensing agreement would eventually allow them to drop the price of Windows substantially? Did anyone ever see the price do anything but increase?

C’mon guys. As much as you want it to be true, your consumers aren’t all as incredibly stupid as you believe. People will stop getting annoyed when you show us a Genuine Advantage. There was a time when I thought Microsoft was a great company. The last 5 years have really been a turn-off in that respect.

Meanwhile, I’m not sure I like the idea of all of the lawsuit stuff. It appears to be another case of Jackpot Justice. I must admit, however, to a certain amout of satisfaction in seeing Microsoft get stomped on in much the same way that they have stomped on others. Live by the sword, die by the sword.

The New York Times has posted an article about the technology Google uses. The article makes me wonder when Google is going to take over the world.