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They sure as hell know how to build stuff that survives being run over with a car let alone a hammer. Plus they will be so stylish everyone will be getting into high speed chases just to have one on their car.
http://arstechnica.com/reviews/hardware/nano.ars/3

It should read: Russian Exchange trades in Computer Viruses

acording to this story on Arstechnica. Altho' I'm getting a 500 error on their eweek reference...

Well, Apple's global share is around 1.9% as of 2004. Dell's market share is around 18% as of 2004. So that means, Apple has about 1/9th of Dell's market share. In terms of number of computers sold, they're still smaller than Acer. I mean, you could also rephrase your statement to say that Apple has nearly 2/3 of Acer's marketshare (or 66%). That makes Apple even larger, right?

Here's the article from Ars a few weeks back. Talks about the company "Engage Advertising" that was responsible for "pioneering localized in-game advertising programs in targeted markets." Just sounds like Spam to me.

Nano's are fragile. VERY fragile

The Nano might not be as fragile as you think.

According to this quick follow up from ArsTechnica Google have denied plans to distribute Ubuntu. According to the article a company spokeswoman said: "[w]e use Ubuntu internally but have no plans to distribute it outside of the company."
Next rumour please!

You geeks need to get the fact through your heads that burning DVDs or playing games on a computer is a privilige, not a right. Normally people burn DVDs with a DVD video recorder, and play games with a games console. If copy protection software gets in the way of either task then you should consider purchasing dedicated devices!

How about this or this?

Wow, pull your head out of the sand. I always thought a government agent or employee penalizing others for their legal political donations would be illegal or something... I guess not though. Watch out who you dontate money to politically.

Why assume that Best Buy is trying to help out the customer? Maybe they're trying to make it more efficient for themselves to eat your money.

Has anyone else had any experience with the online rebate firm onrebate.com? They ate my rebate claiming insufficient documentation (which I know is wrong...), but the worst part is they will not even allow me to resubmit anything to them. After waiting on hold for 30 minutes, the nice customer service representative explained how their decision was final, with no option for recourse whatsoever. Then she even transferred me to her manager, a filled-up voicemail box. Emails have gone unanswered for a month. Apparently they're affiliated with tigerdirect.com, which I understand has equally craptastic customer service. At this point, I'm gonna go to Fry's and try to get them to fulfill the rebate they promised me, as the rebate firm is effectively impossible to contact.

Personally, I think it's safe to assume that Best Buy is no different, and unless they prove otherwise, I'll assume that they "hate their customers after all."

Sony has said they won't use that patent(http://arstechnica.com/journals/thumbs.ars/ 2005/11/9/1779) on the PS3, and I beleive them. There is too much competition in this market for them to do something that obviously asinine.

But WoW for Intel will be available very soon. RTF...uh...FP.

How many stories can we have about the Intel-based iMac's benchmarks?

All of these "benchmarks" are true, as far as they go.

Apple's original SPEC benchmarks are "true".

Macworld's "real world" application benchmarks are "true".

And now, MacSpeedZone's further tests of various tasks also are "true".

I mean, obviously the new iMac isn't going to be 2 times faster for everything under the sun. In fact, Jobs even spoke to this fact in the keynote when he directly said that the tests were just for the CPU and that everything else, like disk I/O and other subsystems, weren't all twice as fast, but it was to illustrate the performance (and performance per watt) of the new Core Duo, which is indeed impressive by any measure.

I think it's safe to say that the new iMac running native applications is definitely faster - sometimes up to twice as fast, and sometimes even more - than the iMac it's replacing. And Rosetta is so impressive that while non-native applications will run slower, it's damned good until native versions of those applications come out, too.

And speaking of CmdrTaco's request for a WoW test on the new iMac...

http://arstechnica.com/journals/apple.ars/2006/1/1 2/2478

"It's fast, fast as in a superlative and not a comparative sense. One wonders why Steve Jobs didn't blow the crowd away with the saturated colors and excessive frame rates of WoW on an iMac. It loaded fast, and when the first character popped up in town, the frame rate never dropped below 60, and this was pretty much going full tilt in the settings."

First of all, this has been around at Stanford since October 2005. This was covered at Ars Technica a month and a half ago (including the Stanford on iTunes site and store).

Second, this is also available at the University of Wisconsin - Madison, as well as other schools, such as UC Berkeley.

What's actually "new" here is that Apple has productized this service for educational institutions in the form of iTunes U, announced yesterday.

Though those who haven't heard of it before may be interested in Steve Jobs' 2005 commencement address at Stanford.

Please note that iTunes U operates on a different server (deimos.apple.com) than the normal music store (phobos.apple.com).

If only the MPAA would bust it's self:
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20060124-6036 .html

Diebold also ran into problems with North Carolina. North Carolina law requires voting machine makers turn over all their source code to the state for review. Code gets held in escrow all the time. So I don't buy their excuse. For some reason I get the feeling that Diebold is trying to cover up really bad and insecure code.

Judging by the number of users not using HD on their TV's for normal TV broadcasts I'd say quite a lot.

I believe you are mistaken in your analys.

It doesn't mean it "sounds simular to psychology 101" it is what you think to read. It's just flattering you praise my ability to recognise psychological patterns and making an analogy as accurate it makes you suspect I speak out of experience or am writing from my subcontious.

There was no personal information in my post, but mostly it seems most slashdotters seem to relate best to "highschool dynamics" and analogies relating to that. I do not speak in terms of "smarter", "the whole school", cause I haven't been there in quite a while. I don't mirror myself to my "popularity" to define myself or to place myself into society (nor my intelligence, nor my education, nor my possesions).

As a matter of fact when you get into the "real world" (I'm assuming you're a highschool kid) popularity matters not. The results you deliver matter, your actions and how you take care of your family and people who have value in your life and not how "cool" people think you are.

You don't have to agree persé, people disagree, not everyone thinks the same. Doesn't mean the other has "unresolved social issues" when one doesn't share your views or misses the motivation of certain comments which imply IE-usage is down and decling. Exact percentages are impossible to show. Cause ofcourse windowsupdate will have a near 100% usage IE browsers.

Now, you say "You cannot neglect 80%" (as that seems to be your point). You cannot neglect that 20% goes out to actively download a browser when one is installed in the OS already, which caused IE to win the browserwars. In my view Microsoft is trying to stop people migrating away and implementing features which weren't planned to keep up.
So to you, Microsoft has remained its identity of "staying steady on front in a dominating position" when they sortof lost interest before?

I think everybody was surprised when the G5 iMac switched to a 32-bit chip. Who predicted it? All predictions I saw only mentioned the G4 Macs (mini, iBook, PowerBook) as possible candidates for 32-bit Yonah.

Seems bass ackwards to me.

After the initial shock, it actually seems reasonable to me. Despite its 32-bitness, Core Duo is very fast, cool (designed for notebooks), and dual-core. Intel's switch to 65nm seems to be going much smoother than their (and IBM's) switch to 90nm. Is IBM producing a fast dual-core G5 that's cool enough for the iMac's form factor and cheap enough for the iMac's price point? Remember, Apple touted "performance per watt" when explaining the switch to Intel.

It seems that that would only hurt performance in "pro" lever apps. But hey I guess we'llhave to wait and see what the towers have in them before passing judgement.

The towers will have Conroe or Woodcrest, both of which are 64-bit CPUs and are due in July at the earliest. The iMac will also probably move to Conroe later this year.

I'm not convinced that, over a 5-7 year lifetime of an iMac, a reduced-power single-core G5 iMac would outperform a Core Duo iMac in pro apps. First, the iMac's form factor probably limits it to 2GB of memory. Given this limitation, will 64-bit pro apps on reduced-speed iMac G5 perform better than the (eventually) optimized 32-bit versions on the iMac Core Duo?

For the iMac's form factor, I think the Core Duo's high performance per watt and dual cores will make up for its limitations for being 32-bit.

Irony? I don't see what is unexpected about this. The PPC chips used in Apple computers weren't all that powerful relative to their new x86 chips. On the other hand, x86 computers are at least comparable in power to the IA64 architecture chips. Emulation of worse chips is easier than emulation of better ones... at least when it comes to real time performance.

You've been listening to too much Apple "2-3x faster" marketing hype.

For instance, there are now quite a few benchmarks of the Core Duo iMac. There's the Ars one that was shown on Slashdot a while ago, and the Macintouch one.

The Core Duo iMac, with two x86 cores, is a very small improvement over the single PPC970. Compared to a two-and-a-half-year-old dual-CPU Power Mac G5, the Core Duo iMac is pathetic. And this is running Intel-native applications like QuickTime and iTunes.

Did you read the article? The only non-Rosetta result that was slower was iPhoto (export to files). It came in at a "dramatic" 0.91x as fast as the G5. Well, I wouldn't call that dramatically slower.

Why was it slower? It's probably spending the vast majority of its time writing data to files. And guess what's the bottleneck there? The hard disk. The disk in the new Intel iMac is most likely slower than the disk in the older G5 (non-iSight) iMac. this post at the Ars forum explains why. Apparently older iMacs had Maxtor disks, newer ones have Western Digital. And according to that post, the Maxtors are faster. Case closed.

As for the other tests, it would be interesting to see the results with varying (but equal) RAM configurations -- say, 512M, 1G, 2G. Does the Intel machine get faster relative to the G5 when both have more memory? Or does the memory help the G5 more? Does extra memory help Rosetta? What about running Rosetta apps multiple times?

It's a shame that none of the current reviews have done such a thorough enough test yet. It should be fairly easy to do, and vastly more informative!

As far as I am aware, the only people who've ever got in trouble for the mp3s they had were sharing those mp3s over public peer-to-peer networks. They were illegally distributing them. The users of allofmp3.com are not doing this; they are purchasing them from an organisation that has the legal right to distribute them, and importing them into their home countries. It's just the same as if they ordered the CDs by mail order from Russia because they're cheaper there. Well, just because no one's gotten in trouble for it doesn't mean it's legal. For you see, the RIAA and even the Russian government doesn't like what's going on with sites like allofmp3. I bet someone is being paid off over there to let this slide.

There's an interesting article at tech law advisor.

The more I read about the supposed specs of the Revolution the more it sounds like it will, outside of higher resolution, easily outpace the 360 in performance. The dual 970ish CPU that is in the Revolution will easily outperform the 360 CPU - which looks like it has realworld performance around a 2 to 2.5GHz dual 970 system. And the custom ATI graphics system in the Revolution sounds like it will be much more advanced than the essentially current gen pc GPU in the 360 - outside of resolution once again.

Everything I've read indicates that the "Cell" chipset can only perform 32-bit ["single precision"] floating point calculations in hardware:

Cell (microprocessor)

Due to the nature of its applications, Cell is optimized towards single precision floating point computation. The SPEs are capable of performing double precision calculations, albeit with an order of magnitude performance penalty. More general purpose computing tasks can be done on the PPE... Additionally, IBM has included a VMX (AltiVec) unit in the Cell PPE...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cell_(microprocessor)

Compare the similar approach of recent nVidia [32-bit] & ATi [24-bit] architectures:

Bazman: CPU? Use the GPU!
...Nowadays you can run numerical calculations on the graphics card's processor...

pkhuong: No IEEE floats
GPUs don't do IEE floats. That might be bad for his purpose...

Anonymous Coward: nvida is pretty close
AFAIK Nvidia's GeforceFX5xxxx and Geforce6xxx GPUs have 32-bit IEEE-like floats (no denormals or signalling NaNs), but for many numerical simulations, they're close enough... On the other hand, Ati can get fp, but only up to 24-bit. Unfortunatly, that's probably not quite single precision...

http://ask.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=123200&cid =10353863&mode=nested&threshold=0

Sound and Vision: A Technical Overview of the Emotion Engine

...As was noted in the bullet list, the VU can be further divided into two independent, 128-bit SIMD/VLIW vector processing units, VU0 and VU1...

http://arstechnica.com/reviews/hardware/ee.ars/3

And boy, do I wish there were a venture capitalist out there [with a few spare billions of dollars] who could purchase the Emotion Engine and keep it alive for those of us who care about precision in our calculations.

I enjoyed the Ars Technica commentary that points to Coherent HyperTransport as a huge strength for AMD in the cheap supercomputer arena.

Anything should be better. I'm not going to get into details here, but if anyone has actually used it, they'll know how limited and clunky it is. John Siracusa outlined the issues well in the Ars write-up on Tiger.

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20060115-5983 .html

PC game sales are listed as being to the tune of $950+ million. Console sales figures are often quoted as being $10.5 billion in sales. But wait, that is not console software sales. That is the total sales volume for the physical consoles themselves, hand-held consoles, peripherals, and software. The home console system and peripheral sales account for $2.5 billion of that total (that's including a launch year numbers for the XBOX 360). The hand-held market accounted for $1.6 billion. Home console software sales accounted for $4.7 billion (a drop of 12% from last year) while portable system software rose 42% to $1.4 billion. Total unit sales of portables and consoles combined were down 6.3% from last year.

So looking at the raw NPD data (some of which appears to be suspect) the best way to sum up PC sales is to say that they fell marginally sharper than console sales. Effectively we are saying the proportion of console to PC sales has remained nearly the same from 2004 to 2005. And that isn't counting revenue generated by subscription services (for either consoles or PC's) or direct digital sales (which consoles are just starting to get into and PC's got into in a big way last year).

On top of that realize that the PC platform is really the equivalent to a single console platform. To really make a 1 to 1 comparisson you have to compare PC game sales figures to PS2, XBOX, XBOX 360, and Gamecube sales figures. By that measuring stick, the PC is the second largest after the Playstation 2.

To sum up, the sky isn't falling, but the market is changing. Cling to the old ways and sales figures from channels becoming increasingly less relevant to your industry and you are going to make the wrong decisions and miss the next wave.

BTW Personal computer sales rose 15.6% by volume (worldwide) over last year to a staggering $202 billion while PC video card/chipset sales (for NVIDIA and ATI only) rose to $4 billion (up 12.9% over last year).

We know that the MPAA has claimed that buying pirated movies supports terrorism.

Therefore, these proud patroits in West Virginia (death to all tyrants!) were simply providing a means for Americans to purchase pirated movies without supporting Al Queada (or however they spell thier name). After all, we've learned that breaking the law is perfectly legal as long as you put the words "fighting the war on terrorism" in front of it.

Now, if we can just get them to take care of that whole "get money from oil revenues to finance terrorism" thing, and we've got it licked!

The part of TFA about trying to run windows reminded me of the scene from zoolander where they're spoofing space odyssey 2001. He tried mashing all sorts of button combinations to try and get the windows CD to boot, and concluded after all his button-mashing that "I think it's going to be a matter of time before Windows is running on the iMac, especially Vista."

not to mention the intel GMA900 graphics processor isn't exactly the speediest thing around.

Don't mention it, then. Especially since the iMac Core Duo uses a PCI-Express ATI Radeon X1600.

http://arstechnica.com/reviews/hardware/imac-cored uo.ars/7

I tried to boot from a Windows XP installer CD. No dice. I then tried booting from a Vista installer DVD (Build 5270). Again, no dice. When holding down the Option key, the only icon that appeared was for the iMac's internal hard drive. Holding down the D key to try to force booting off of the optical drive failed as well. With the Vista DVD, the optical drive churned a bit and the iMac hesitated as though it were contemplating whether it wanted to boot the foreign OS. Soon afterwards, the familiar gray Apple logo appeared on screen and Mac OS X finished booting.

The new Intel Macs don't have an EFI shell, so there's no way to directly get at the EFI. Someone is ultimately going to have to write and/or use an existing EFI shell to tell the EFI to boot from alternate media to get things going. Naturally, running Windows under virtualization, with technologies like Intel's VT/Vanderpool, which the Core Duo in the new Macs does support, are going to be the way to go for most users anyway.

http://arstechnica.com/journals/apple.ars

hehehe *snort* hehe...

Sorry, those Microsoft marketers again.

So exactly when were they supposed to check it line-by-line as they were adding code that has been in windows for 10 years?

Maybe before they made their claim that this is the safest version of Windows ever.

Seriously, it should've been checked when they added the WMF functionality to Windows, but maybe because it's in assembly language they didn't check it (that was what was hinted at on Ars where Microsoft has some rather vague excuses, none of which answer to Steve's points. Just don't whine about this to Steve Gibson, he lives and breathes in assembly. Not a big deal). Yes granted this was back when security was no big deal. And yes granted, this is a tricky isssue, when the design requirements were are certain way, but the context changed. This is what makes coding a challenge. This was code designed for one way, where they retrofitted it to another use, rather than refactoring. But when you have 16 million lines of code plus...

"The Department will also implement Basic Access Control (BAC) to mitigate further any potential threat of skimming or eavesdropping. [...] BAC utilizes a form of Personal Identification Number (PIN) that must be physically read in order to unlock the data on the chip. In this case, the PIN will be derived from the printed characters from the second line of data on the Machine-Readable Zone that is visibly printed on the passport data page. The BAC also results in the communication between the chip and the reader being encrypted, providing further protection."

It's worth noting that the New Zealand passports do not have this implemented; all data is transferred in the clear.

The chip in the Xbox 2 is very similar to what's in a power mac G5. The chip that's going in to the PS3 is pretty much unlike anything avalible today.

That said, it's possible that there will be a 1/4 speed xbox2 emulator for the G5 powermacs at some point, seeing as how the G5s were shipped to xbox2 developers as development machines.
I'm not sure I'd agree with you that the Xenon (in X360) is similar to the CPU in a Power Mac G5. From the Ars articles on the CPUs the (in the Xenon case gurestimated) execution unit layouts are:

PowerPC 970 functional units [1]

        * Two floating-point units
        * Two integer units
        * Two load-store units
        * One branch unit
        * One vector unit

The PPE's execution units (note that there are 3 of these cores on the Xenon chip): [2]

        * 1 integer unit
        * 1 floating-point unit
        * 1 branch unit
        * 1 load-store unit
        * 2 VMX-128 units

Basically, less power to the normal execution (FP and int) and more to the vector processors. Apparently the instruction set in the vector units on the Xenon (and Cell for that matter) are subsets of Altivec they do have some specific additions to optimize 3D processing. So while they are similar, they are not all that similar. The Xenon is clearly optimized for a very specific purpose.

It may be possible to emulate the simple games like Geometry War on a G5, but I doubt it'll ever happen. If for no other reason than that I imagine encryption on the X360 will kill off a lot of those possibilities. It'll be far more efficient to just reimpliment those few games on the target platform than to make an emulator. (Not that this has ever stopped hackers before.)

Also consider that the other parts of a X360 differ a lot from what you find in a typical computer. And for historical reasons you can consider that while the Xbox is extremely similar to a Intel PC there are still no emulators for it (there are some proof on concept emulators, but they don't work well).

[1] http://arstechnica.com/articles/paedia/cpu/xbox360 -2.ars
[2] http://arstechnica.com/articles/paedia/cpu/xbox360 -2.ars/4

The chip in the Xbox 2 is very similar to what's in a power mac G5. The chip that's going in to the PS3 is pretty much unlike anything avalible today.

That said, it's possible that there will be a 1/4 speed xbox2 emulator for the G5 powermacs at some point, seeing as how the G5s were shipped to xbox2 developers as development machines.
I'm not sure I'd agree with you that the Xenon (in X360) is similar to the CPU in a Power Mac G5. From the Ars articles on the CPUs the (in the Xenon case gurestimated) execution unit layouts are:

PowerPC 970 functional units [1]

        * Two floating-point units
        * Two integer units
        * Two load-store units
        * One branch unit
        * One vector unit

The PPE's execution units (note that there are 3 of these cores on the Xenon chip): [2]

        * 1 integer unit
        * 1 floating-point unit
        * 1 branch unit
        * 1 load-store unit
        * 2 VMX-128 units

Basically, less power to the normal execution (FP and int) and more to the vector processors. Apparently the instruction set in the vector units on the Xenon (and Cell for that matter) are subsets of Altivec they do have some specific additions to optimize 3D processing. So while they are similar, they are not all that similar. The Xenon is clearly optimized for a very specific purpose.

It may be possible to emulate the simple games like Geometry War on a G5, but I doubt it'll ever happen. If for no other reason than that I imagine encryption on the X360 will kill off a lot of those possibilities. It'll be far more efficient to just reimpliment those few games on the target platform than to make an emulator. (Not that this has ever stopped hackers before.)

Also consider that the other parts of a X360 differ a lot from what you find in a typical computer. And for historical reasons you can consider that while the Xbox is extremely similar to a Intel PC there are still no emulators for it (there are some proof on concept emulators, but they don't work well).

[1] http://arstechnica.com/articles/paedia/cpu/xbox360 -2.ars
[2] http://arstechnica.com/articles/paedia/cpu/xbox360 -2.ars/4

The PowerPC was jointly designed and developed by this alliance.

You can read here:
http://arstechnica.com/articles/paedia/cpu/ppc-1.a rs/1

PS3 is just a niche thing for Cell, the workstation/server space is way to go:
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20051007-5403 .html
http://techon.nikkeibp.co.jp/english/NEWS_EN/20050 525/105050/

Don't worry. Reasonable voice QoS will remain very expensive on legacy (read "differentially priced") airlines. As soon as IP-to-ground services get low enough latency and jitter for voice performance, you can bet the airlines will figure out that some small percentage of their high-$ passengers value this highly.

One of two things will happen. One possibility is that prioritized transit of packets will end up priced only slightly below the pound-me-in-the-ass rates of airphone. The other is that decent QoS will be priced into first class seats and/or front-of-the-plane frequent flyers.

Steven Wright said something like: "I just had the most expensive meal of my life. It was in a movie theater in an airport." Don't worry, it can get worse.

[Disclosure: I've been online from an airliner with a Palm Modem on my Pilot 1000, a PCMCIA faxmodem from my HP 200LX, and I've probably blocked from memory any Newton dialups. At least back in the dark ages, half the fun was sending out "Dear foo, I am writing to you from an airplane" messages....]

First the final death of ie for mac http://arstechnica.com/journals/apple.ars/2005/12/ 19/2142 and now this? Death of 3rd class software on an otherwise elegant system? It's like, Mac just shook off a few fleas!

Yeah, Ars Technica said that the MacBook Pro battery life was around 3 hours.

You've read 1984, haven't you? Those weren't TVs, they were computers.

The great majority of proles did not even have telescreens in their homes.

...

'There's no telescreen!' he could not help murmuring.

'Ah,' said the old man, 'I never had one of those things. Too expensive.

--George Orwell "1984"

I don't think the government would have much luck slipping the code by us proles unless Apple_iSight.kext is NOT part of the open source Darwin core. According to Apple Developer Documentation, that kext is primarily concerned with iris state. I am unsure of source availability.

It is also worth mentioning that various intelligence agencies of the US government *physically disable* built in microphones in their computer hardware routinely before deployment. I would assume the same would go for a built in camera.

Um, this is the first slashdot has heard of these? A few days behind everyone else it seems.

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20060105-5911 .html

It has been a while since I used their advise, but I have always found it appropriate. If you want specs for computers, check out the Ars Technica System Guide

http://arstechnica.com/guides/buyer/system-guide-2 00511.ars

They have everything you need to know, current and accurate.

Here's where the 'sweet spots' in terms of performance/price are, in my opinion; choose depending on your budget. (Of course, if your goal is to waste money, there's plenty of components available at or near $1000 prices, as well, but they don't provide much more than a 20% or so performance increase over the $200-300 options.)


Processor:
Athlon 64 3200+ ($160)
A 2GHz Athlon 64 with 512K cache. As is widely known, these beat the pants off of Pentium 4s.

Athlon 64 X2 3800+ ($320)
Two 2GHz Athlon 64s with 512K cache (dual core).



Motherboard:
Abit KN8 SLI ($110)
SLI doesn't carry much of a price premium any more these days, so it can't hurt to have the extra upgrade capability. Other brands like DFI, Asus, MSI, EPoX, are fine as well.



Memory:
2x 512MB Crucial PC-3200 ($95)
2x 1GB Crucial PC-3200 ($170)
Two is so you can run them in dual channel mode. Other good brands include Corsair, Kingston, Mushkin, OCZ.


Video card:
GeForce 6600GT 128MB ($125)
8 pixel pipelines at 500MHz = 4 Gigasomethings

GeForce 6800GS 256MB ($190)
12 pipelines at 425MHz = 5.1 Gigasomethings. This also has double the memory and memory bandwidth of a 6600GT, so it'll handle higher resolutions and antialiasing levels much better.

GeForce 7800GT 256MB ($270)
20 pipelines at 400MHz = 8 Gigasomethings. This is almost exactly double a 6600GT in many respects (double the pixel pushing power, memory, and memory bandwidth).


If you want to find things out for yourself, I recommend browsing around at The Tech Report and AnandTech; I've found these two to consistently have the highest quality reviews and comparisons out there. Their system guides don't completely suck, either. (Neither do Ars Technica's, but they don't do hardware reviews).

In all likelyhood, the specs will never be completely revealed. However, third party developers with access to hardware documentation say it will be 2.5 times more powerful than the GameCube.

while HD-DVD is a long way from being open, it is not nearly as horribly DRM-infested as Blu-ray is going to be and really is a better choice for the consumer. I have to call bullshit here. Check this article out. Sony gained Twentieth Century Fox just last week when the Blu-ray Disc Association (BDA) reportedly agreed to add watermarking technology to the spec. This has kicked off a round of sniping between Blu-ray and HD DVD proponents over which solution is more secure. The debate is a bit strange because the two solutions use largely the exact same core tech, namely the Advanced Access Content System (AACS). Both sides are competing for attention by including as many copy prevention features as possible, and both are neck and neck at this point.

Try these:

• http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=SCO+legal+fee s+limit
• SCO Puts limit on its Legal Payments
• Start-up hedges companies' bets against SCO
• SCO Cuts deal for legal expenses
• SCO Puts a Cap on its Legal Expenses
• SCO's case doesn't fit, but the lawyers won't quit

No, me too. I think we are the only two.

I mean they want to have differentiation between the consumer and pro models. Why not release the ibook with "similar" specs to the current powerbooks with celeron or lowend pentium m processors? This will prevent major cannabalization of the current powerbook lines and allow them to release the yonah based powerbooks as the pro model they really are.

There will be a single single-core version of Yonah at launch and this might be a good candidate for the iBook (with PowerBooks being dual-core). However, at $209, the single-core Yonah seems a bit expensive for a "low end" notebook. In a few months, Intel will likely release Celeron M CPUs based on the Yonah core (single core), but with a lower FSB (533MHz vs 667Mhz) and less L2 cache (1MB vs 2MB). These would be way too late for a MacWorld announcement.

I think there's a very good chance that the current Dothan-based Celeron M will be used in the new iBooks (and maybe Mac minis) that are expected at MacWorld. Based on the current Pentium M core (but with lower FSB and L2 cache), the Celeron M is cheap, fast, and runs cool.

The current Celeron M does lack SSE3 support and many people think SSE3 will be required for the new Intel Macs. However, I think this assumption might be false and is based on the fact that the Dev Kit version of OS X for Intel requires SSE3 (the Dev Kit CPU has SSE3). Since the Dev Kit version was only intended to be used on one CPU, and SSE3 is off by default in XCode, I suspect that SSE2 will be enough for the official release of OS X on Intel.

The pilot episode was done with construction paper, which took several months. When the pilot was sold and they needed a production setup, they went with computer animation. Over the first several episodes after the pilot, the construction paper appearance made by the computer rendering improved, but the first episode has a great construction paper look that, in my opinion, still hasn't been replicated in the later computer created episodes. It's interesting to think of how much computer CPU power has increased since 1997 when the show first aired (think back to overclocking Celeron 300a's to 450MHz - that was a year or two AFTER they were computer animating South Park!)

The big problem with South Park production is that although the show is digitally animated at 24fps (frames per second), it is then telesync'd to 30fps, and THEN EDITED IN VIDEO (I don't know if this is still true in the lastest episodes, but was documented to be so in 1999 in interviews). It is probable that the original 24fps animation from earlier episodes in digital form is no more.

Editing the episodes after telesync not only destroys what could be a beautiful 24fps progressive film DVD, but the editing they do in video chops up the telesync terribly, messing up the field order with almost every edit. I have even seen edits where only half of an original 2-field film pair is present, making it impossible for software or a progressive scan dvd player to reconstruct a non-interlaced progressive film frame. Also the DVD transfers that they have done are not the best, they have composite video dot crawl and shimmer from leaving the digital domain - the first several DVDs look like they were made from analog tapes.

Even more interesting trivia is that the animators sometimes get the episodes done in less than a week and deliver them to Comedy Central the day they are supposed to air!

a large portion of of the Australian citizenry are technically breaking the law, and while that may not sit poorly with a nation born of criminality