$100,000 for a virtual space station?!?! But this was no joke, and Jon Jacobs thinks he can make over a million dollars in virtual taxes in 1 year! I guess it might be time to start investing in virtual equity now...Hiro Protagonist's (Snow Crash) knew what he was doing. Check out the Cnet article here.

300 GB of storage on a "Holographic Versatile Disc" (HVD)...hmm. Check out the Slashdot article here.

I know MIT's $100 prototype computer is old news, but now that CNET has photos available for the $100 laptop I thought I'd make a posting about it. I think it's funny that the photos advertise this laptop to function as a handheld, ebook, laptop, tablet pc, "theater", and writing pad; considering their optimism for this device, it's hard to believe the price tag will remain at $100, especially considering the form factor and the likely demand to arise from wealthy markets as well. Probably the coolest feature on the laptop is the hand-crank used to charge the battery, and funniest goes to the ac cord that also functions as a handle :)

When I first moved into my new apartment one of the first things I noticed was an old Primestar dish sitting on the roof next to the porch. Primestar was bought out by DirectTV in 1999 and unfortunately no longer supports Primestar dishes (so it won't be possible to share my dad's DirectTV service) but I found a page that describes how to convert the dish into an 802.11b antenna. Although not terribly useful, if it can strengthen our wireless signal for the porch and our attic it might be cool. We'll see if I have the energy to try it out sometime...

Class Schedule Fall 2005

Intel is finally making some progress in the right direction for the desktop market by replacing the horribly inefficient Netburst architecture. The new architecture of currently no-name will consist of a 14 stage pipeline (2 more stages than the Athlon64 which will primarily provide Intel with more headroom for frequency) and a 4-issue core; in turn, this chip will be very competitive with the current Athlon64. More information can be found here.

A hard drive and dvd burner combo will soon be available from Hitachi supporting up to a Terabyte of data. Now I just need to convince Jesse to pick one up for Bascom (and maybe one for myself as well) :)

Well, my crappy Kyocera KX-414 (Phantom) cell phone has finally decided to stop responding to my A/C charger. It's been sending warning signs for months, and I ended up buying a new adapter last month to continue pushing it, but I can no longer get it to charge, so I'm using a friend's cell phone temporarily until I manage to replace this one.

On a sidenote, since my PDA isn't much use during the summer (my schedule of 11 - 5 M-F isn't very complicated), it's been sitting on my desk for months. The Handspring Visor Deluxe isn't doing too well these days; the casing is scratched to hell, I no longer have the plastic screen cover nor the Springboard spaceholder, and the mp3 player I purchased for it last year no longer works. I've been searching for a new PDA for almost a year now, and either I end up passing up decent deals at Dell for Axims or just decide to wait for something better.

Well, now that I need to purchase a new cell phone, it may be time to look into getting a Smartphone (a cell phone with built in PDA functions). U.S. Cellular doesn't give me many options, but since I'm sharing plans with my parents, I'd rather not switch, so I've been looking at the Kyocera 7135 Smartphone. It is equipped with a whopping 33 MHz Motorola processor (twice as fast as my visor), powered by Palm OS 4, includes a color screen, and SD expansion. It should last a few hours for talk time, around 8 hours for mp3s, and a few days standby. Although the CNET review isn't entirely accurate, it provides a decent summary of the device and its features.

One lacking attribute is the OS/Processor: without Palm OS 5 and an ARM-based processor, I won't have the flexibility to play video using any format but, more importantly, I won't be able to use the currently available WIFI SDIO cards. Although both of these features are meaningless with such a small screen, they would still be nice to have, and are characteristics I was looking for in a replacement PDA. However, I believe this may be the phone/PDA I will settle for, at least until the price comes down on the beauty called the Archos Pocket Media Assistant (PMA400). This $800 beast can play and record mpeg-4 videos and play mp3s using the equipped 30GB hard drive, and bundles Linux with PIM functions and WIFI with the Opera browser! Maybe one day I'll be able to at least hold this device in my hands for a few minutes, and maybe even get to have one to carry around, and just use WIFI for phone service using VoIP :)

Oh, snap, I finally feel like posting an update to my blog! Actually, I just wanted to leave a comment concerning this depressing fiasco over Hot Coffee for GTA - San Andreas. I guess we were bound to reach the point where game programmers and developers have to start being more careful over what type of content can be found in games and lock down features/hacks. To keep games fresh with unique content and in part to keep programmers happy, game programmers need to have freedom to be creative with their games. Instead, now that Take Two is getting in trouble over such an insignificant hack (I mean, come on, you can unlock nudity in the Sims, but no one complains about that), game publishers are going to have to lock down game content and options to ensure that ratings are met and political mothers concerned about their children's exposure to violence doesn't involve sex. Since game development is approaching the heights of film production, I suppose this was bound to happen; now we have to wait for the indie game publishers to spawn and give us something fresh and creative.

Anyways, I wish I could say that my new website is coming along great, but all I can say is that I chose a background for the page, but since I've installed Windows x64 I haven't reinstalled Dreamweaver or Photoshop so I haven't put further development into it. Hopefully within the next two weeks I can whip together a decent webpage to prepare for my return to college. Later, G's.

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Tom's Hardware is hosting an article about a 1.8" 30 GB hard drive. Why isn't this 30 GB hard drive in PDAs today? I've been watching the Archos Pocket Media Assistant, which can record and playback video, music, photos, stored on a 30 GB hard drive (not sure if this is the same drive), and is running Linux equiped with many common PDA apps. However, the price tag for this device is $800. One day soon, I want to be able to pick up a device just as good or even better for between $300 or $400 (I hope).

HP has thought up some cool tricks to help reduce power usage in laptops. The technology allows a laptop to only brighten the part of the screen that is being used, and apparently this can increase battery life by up to 11 times...check it out.

Hmm...looks like Microsoft really is ready to embrace Sun. Sun seems to have contributed some of their latest AMD Opteron servers and workstations to Microsoft, and at least one of the Microsoft employees was excited enough about them to spill the news on his blog. Check out the Register article here.

Hmmm...AMD or Intel chips on the same motherboard? Interesting...hopefully anandtech or Tom's Hardware will follow this up with a review. Thanks to mcmullet for the heads up!

Burn labels for DVDs just by placing the DVD in the burner facedown and pressing Record! Read more on the LiteOn-built DVD burner with Lightscribe technology at Tom's Hardware.

Microsoft...conforming to standards?!?! Check out Opera's CTO Hakon Lie's response to Bill Gates's call for interoperability.

Well, now I realize how bulky my USB flash drive / SD card reader is, after seeing this SD card with built-in usb connector.

Damn, that's cool, even if I'll be paying quite a bit more for the card and increase the likelyhood of dropping and losing it.

Oh, and Happy New Year!

Wow...last post was more than a month ago. I'm sure by now no one checks this blog :P

Anyways, just wanted to quote Gmail on Thanksgiving...here it goes:

A Gobble approach to email.

In 1621, a few hundred Pilgrims and Native Americans sat down to celebrate a bountiful harvest. The feast lasted three days, and included fowl, venison, fish, berries, watercress, lobster, dried fruit, clams, and plums. There was no pumpkin pie, however. There was also an alarming lack of user-friendly webmail services.

Now, 383 years later, it's once again time to celebrate what has come to be known as Thanksgiving—a time to gather with family and friends and give thanks for all that we have. We have many things to be thankful for. But mostly, we are thankful for you—our users—who remind us of why we work so hard all year and why we love what we do. That's better than all the dried fruit and clams in the world.

Happy Thanksgiving! Thank you for making our approach to email yours.

Gobble gobble,
The Gmail Team

WOW...Intel finally admitted to its mistake with the Pentium 4 and, in particular, clock speed scaling with the Prescott chips to improve performance. The article mentioned that Intel plans to de-emphasize clock speed and focus on improving other parts of the chip, including adding cache and using dual-core configuration next year. We've already started to notice the change through Intel's decision to use model numbers for their chips, and now it is official.

There is also a mention that Intel does plan to port the low-power and efficient Athlon-clone (aka Pentium M) to the desktop. Code-named Merom, the release of this desktop chip will finally bring Intel in line with AMD and is a good direction for the desktop processor industry.

OK, quick post: this is an article that I've had open in Opera for too long now, and since I have to start closing down some tab, here it is.

AMD has recently added engineers from the Sun UltraSparc V line, since Sun has decided to only focus on development for UltraSparc IV and x86 processors, etc. That, in addition to engineers from Digital Equipment's Alpha group, will make a formidable team to continue making efficient, powerful, and price competitive processors. Read more here.

Open Source - How Should It Shape the Computer Industry

A big topic in the computing world lately has to do with open source licensing. What should be open sourced, and what should remain copyrighted? The BSD license is different from the GPL in that it allows source code to be used in a commercial product; this seems reasonable because otherwise the entire software industry will move towards services. We're seeing that already with Red Hat, IBM, and other Linux-based companies, but we're also seeing companies like Sun and Novell who clearly make it known that proprietary technology will remain a large part of their business, and that the open source community can work with the business world to create products, not just services.

I would agree with the way the BSD license works, since it does allow for innovation beyond the base product. Bill Gates makes a point by saying that there will still be complex tasks that would be best accomplished in an open source environment (the video can be seen here). In the end, however, business will determine whether these BSD-based products will have enough contributions beyond the base product to have a value.

Jonathan Schwartz also argues in his blog that although Sun open sources some of its software (OpenOffice/StarOffice), software patents are necessary to incent "inventors to invent, and investors to invest". He does mention that there is a difference between open standards and open source, and that is where things get a little hazy. I would like to believe that open source software pushes for standards in areas where the standard is too complex to document (i.e. an operating system), and by commoditising software by creating an open source derivative of something a standard is essentially created. Open source is just a subset of open standards, so I am not implying that commercial software or support cannot be created around open source or open standards.

I guess we'll see how things pan out in the future of the software industry. We are already seeing two sides form, one based on services and the other integrating open source products in commercial goods. For the industry to remain as large as it has been these past few years, this mix is necessary.