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The article is a nice start. For getting the lay of the land, I like the enthusiast sites like Tom's Hardware, AnandTech, and ExtremeTech. Silent PC Review shows some nice components for building silent PCs.

Usually, I buy CPUs that are not the latest (better bang/buck) but couple them with the new motherboards, decent (but not overextravagant) memory, and a nice video/TV card like the ATI All-in-wonder series. It's difficult to get the latest ATI A-I-W card from the stock computer builders. If you don't do excessive gaming, you can opt for slightly less CPU and a lower power ATI A-I-W; that will help you build a more silent computer. Building your own also lets you try out the better cases, so there's less Apple envy. Cool cases can be had from places like Ahanix, Lian Li, and Nexus (check out both the iStyle and Breeze cases).

err , linux already does run on 64bit processors. Suse linux has supported this for over 1 year now. I cant speak for the applications in KDE, but the Distro definitly comes with a 64bit kernel on the other side of the DVD.Since Intel seem to have quietly reverse engineered and copied the AMD Instruction set , I don't see why It should not work with 64 bit Linux.More here : http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,3973,1561875 ,00.asp?kc=ETRSS02129TX1K0000532

If they named it FTTH then you would expect the appropriate speeds . I am talking 100 megabits/sec. Are they trying to 'dupe' rich middle class internet users ? I think so.

Extremetech article on Verizon's $ 44.95/month , 15mbits . And $39.95 for 5megabits/sec downloads.

Is this comparable to FTTH,Fiber To The Home ? Nope.

Thats why we need to keep 'PUBLIC SUPPORT' for 'Municpal FTTH' which is real broadboand and not the name hijacked variety.

Recent /. link
Digital Ink Prototype Uses Nanotech
http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,1558,1764899 ,00.asp?kc=ETRSS02129TX1K0000532
From the article, "promises tremendous power savings over traditional LCD screens"

I've heard size does't matter, wider is better, but this is a new one ;)

All other things being equal, smaller pixels are better. You can always increase your font size on a display with smaller pixels, but you can only fit so much content on a display with a limited number of them.

I'm looking forward to the day someone delivers a truely resolution independant interface, and I expect it will arrive on the Mac first. But for now, even many web pages choose to force font size on me. So no, I can't always increase font size.

Run the math, the 24" widescreen (16:10) is 12.7" vertically, the 20" is 12.0" (ballpark); they both push 1200 pixels vertically. So they pixel size is just about identical; but the widescreen has about 35% more screen area/20% more pixels. Perhaps the measure you really want is pixels per square inch.

14.1"(1400x1050): 15.4kppsi

15"(1400x1050): 13.6kppsi

2001FP: 10.0kppsi

2405FP: 8.9kppsi

17"(1280x1024): 9.5kppsi

19"(1280x1024): 7.5kppsi

So the pixel density is right in line with conventional other desktop panels, a little better than your 213t. I'm not sure about its pixels aren't even close to square, are you refering to trying to force 4x3 images onto a 16x10 screen? Games are the only thing I can see forcing this, and the Dell at least has a mode to handle that, just like widescreen TV's.

A good review of th dell panel is here

DFI and AOpen both make boards. See http://www.techreport.com/reviews/2005q1/dfi-855gm e-mgf/index.x?pg=1 and http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,1558,1728546 ,00.asp for reviews of each.

Including exactly what performance will mean with this chip... Link.

This slide says it best... :)

http://www.extremetech.com/slideshow_viewer/0,2393 ,l=&s=25928&a=147125&po=5a,00.asp

I think MS Windows MCE 2005 is a better interface for ATI's HDTV Wonder, but it's not a cheap "upgrade" option. The OS (OEM only) costs $119 (plus $2 in hardware) at Directon. In addition, a standard analog TV tuner must also be installed. That costs an additional $60.

Extremetech has an article titled "Build Your Own Windows Media Center PC" where they use an ATI HDTV Wonder with Windows MCE 2005. They work great together.

Printable version here.

My christmas lights and BBQ Grill would look HULK'ing on that monitor! ;-)

There aren't really 11 independent channels. There's really only 3 or 4 depending how much overlap you're able to tolerate.

If the boys and girls at Redmond keep expanding the windows kernel at it's current rate we'll need all of that 1TB and more!

There's a cool article here for those interested in a little windoze history.

"Build it and they will come" is attractive if you know they'll come but maybe Gateway had it right: rent out time on idling in-store demo computers. http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,1558,1125371 ,00.asp

Let's see... Over 100 Apple stores, Xgrid http://www.apple.com/acg/xgrid/ iPod Linux...

Pixar may have a new place to render movies. :)

MD

" Among these could be new products from Motorola. Motorola, the second-ranked mobile phone vendor in terms of unit sales, enjoyed the strongest growth during the fourth quarter according to iSuppli Corp, with shipments growing by 36.5 percent. Overall, the mobile phone market expanded to 195 million units in the fourth quarter, an all-time high, up 14.7 percent from 170 million in the third quarter."

I would like to know:
Is Microsoft working with hardware and computer manufacturers to make PC's "unfriendly to Linux"?

In general? It looks like it. The potential is there to ensure that rival software and operating systems will not work on this hardware:

If the drivers were free software someone skilled enough would hack the missing features. Isn't about time to nVidia change its mind and release the sources?

Tell that to David Kirk nvidia's chief scientist whose, "sense is that developers on those platforms are quite happy with our efforts" as a justification for not going open source. Plus some totally bizarro bullshit about "hackers tak[ing] bad advantage of raw hardware interfaces."

It is telling that he did not pull out the old, tried and true "competition sensitive" bullshit that so many hardware vendors have been hiding behind since day one.

Maybe because just the plaintext/sleeve key is stored in the registry, and not the actual activation keys.

Changing the plaintext key in the registry really doesn't do very much, at least as far as Windows Update is concerned.

http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,1558,1188770 ,00.asp

Exactly. The only news here is Intel essentially admitting their mistake with the marketing driven P4. For those who are surprised by these results see previous stories on the subject. See this Doom3 and Far Cry benchmark from the link in the first slashdot article and this extremetech article and this French benchmark. And these are not the only sources. The fact is that on a modern platform the Pentium M is quite competitive with not only a P4 at nearly twice the clock speed, but also with Athlon64 chips at nearly half the power of even a 90 nm Winchester Athlon64 with a max TDP of either 21 or 29 Watts for the older and newer chips respectively.

That's not to say that it is competitive in every domain, but for gaming it is tough to beat. And, yes, many modern games do scale with CPU power.

Well, yes and no. thi s article claims that even the fastest lcds can only match 60 Hz... so right now refresh rates are not the issue. Don't show me your calculation of how the refresh rate is faster than than. it isn't measured right to do that.

Heh heh heh! I love these kinds of hacks because they cut to the reason that PCs are both so useful and at the same time the bane of the movie, recording, and to some extent, the gaming industry. As far as I know, this hack to get the cheat codes doesn't violate any current laws (maybe the EULA for the game), but I can imagine the legal types at Rockstar not being too happy, especially if Rockstar planned to profit by publishing the codes later. In their zeal to protect IP like cheat codes, I'm sure that some would love to be able to ban PCs altogether or at least control access to various ports with DRM schemes. There's already at least one DRM enabled BIOS shipping.

Besides the confusion you see here, one may note that ExpressCard, besides the name, is not new at all. It was originaly named "NEWCARD" and announced 2 years ago.

FYI, you can find more about its history here, here, and here.

I can't afford another music player. I'm just saying, nothing Apple is doing is making you buy from their store. You don't have to buy an iPod, you don't have to use the iTMS. There are several good alternatives out there.

As for licensing it to other stores, I don't see why they should. They were even sued by Virgin to force licensing, and a court in France said it wasn't anti-competitive. I'm sure a similar ruling would be issued here in the US.

And finally, I'm okay with a broken Real. I just consider it payback for all that crap they installed on my computer. They had one of the most intrusive and annoying products. I don't use it anymore, and I don't like them because of it.

The SoC (system-on-chip) of the PSP contains all processing units including 2 CPU cores, a graphics core, eDRAM, and other goodies in a single 90nm-process die chip, so what in short is not specifically GPU. Besides this main chip, a PSP unit has a wireless controller, a DDR-SDRAM chip and a UMD controller on the motherboard.

don't have a problem with Apple being able to dominate any market, as long as it is not in an anti-competive way. Not licensing their protected AAC format is anti-competitive. At least MS will license their DRMed windows audio to anyone who wants it.

Apparently, the infamous French Competition Council agrees with this opinion. They claim that the iPod plays several formats of music, of which FairPlay/AAC is only one. It would be entirely possible for an enterprising company to leverage this to make a system which relies on the iPod's natural security (it is difficult, although not impossible, to remove songs from your iPod... at least for a casual user) and specific downloading tools.

Since Real has managed to make Harmony (and evidently Apple can't stop them), you've got concrete evidence that it's possible, albeit difficult.

But... has anyone considered that the decision to license their format may not be Apple's choice? Apple itself licenses the DRM they are using, they didn't create it in house. Much like Nvidia may not be able to legally open their graphics card drivers, Apple may be in a position where it is not their call to make.

So far, the FairPlay format has proven to be pretty good. Not perfect, but we know that no DRM scheme can be. The RIAA is demanding that DRM be used. And it's also quite possible that they don't want Apple to license the DRM either. When it comes to iTMS, Apple has to listen to the RIAA, otherwise they'll back out entirely.

Does this mean that Apple might be in a legal-rock-or-hard-place? Possibly... but here's an even worse thought. What happens if this situation forces them to close iTMS?

Competition is the only thing that drives true capitalism. If we allow competition to be taken away (such as with Apple not licensing their protected AAC), then we end up with broken capitalism and more monopolies like MS.

Apple's music store is so popular because of the experience as a whole. It is easy, attractive, and has a good selection. But other music stores have comparable selections, and other music players integrate with them just fine. We are not yet at a situation where you must use an iPod and iTMS in order to get anything done in the digital music world.

To further prove the case, note that it's trivially easy to burn the protected songs to CDs, and then rip them back into another format. You may suffer some quality loss in this fashion, but in most cases it will not be significant enough to ruin the song (unless you are an audiophile with a trained ear). Apple could sneakily address this problem with a DRM'd lossless encoding of the file.

The suit is spurious, and should be dismissed. Maybe in 5 years he'll have grounds for it.

There is an interesting set of articles over at Extremetech that compare CRT, LCD, Plasma and DLP display systems.

• Part 1 - The Primary Specs
• Part 2 - Gray-Scale and Color Accuracy
• Part 3 - Display Artifacts and Image Quality
• Part 4 - Display Technology Assessments

There is an interesting set of articles over at Extremetech that compare CRT, LCD, Plasma and DLP display systems.

• Part 1 - The Primary Specs
• Part 2 - Gray-Scale and Color Accuracy
• Part 3 - Display Artifacts and Image Quality
• Part 4 - Display Technology Assessments

There is an interesting set of articles over at Extremetech that compare CRT, LCD, Plasma and DLP display systems.

• Part 1 - The Primary Specs
• Part 2 - Gray-Scale and Color Accuracy
• Part 3 - Display Artifacts and Image Quality
• Part 4 - Display Technology Assessments

There is an interesting set of articles over at Extremetech that compare CRT, LCD, Plasma and DLP display systems.

• Part 1 - The Primary Specs
• Part 2 - Gray-Scale and Color Accuracy
• Part 3 - Display Artifacts and Image Quality
• Part 4 - Display Technology Assessments

There is an interesting set of articles over at Extremetech that compare CRT, LCD, Plasma and DLP display systems.

• Part 1 - The Primary Specs
• Part 2 - Gray-Scale and Color Accuracy
• Part 3 - Display Artifacts and Image Quality
• Part 4 - Display Technology Assessments

I know there are a lot of people interested in what some of the former TechTV employees are doing now. Most of them have webpages but Patrick Norton does not. For those wondering Patrick is currently doing freelance writing. Recent articles have appeared on ExtremeTech, CNet and PC-World amongst others.

Again, Patrick does NOT have a website or blog but I do try to post links to articles he's writen on my blog as I run across them and as time allows.

Uh, that's VxWorks by Wind River. (My DSL modem runs it, and I've got a buddy who works on embedded systems with that OS--I hear a lot of complaints about it from him, but that's another story.)

And as I recall, the problem with the rover(s? -- I don't remember if both rovers had this issue or just one) was that there was a scheduling conflict where a high priority task spawned a low priority task that blocked waiting for some event, and subsequently prevented a higher priority task from starting (that might have been a task related to filesystem stuff on the flash memory, now that I think about it).

I'm trying to find a link now. This link says the problem was with removing files in the DOS (do they mean VFAT?) filesystem in Spirit's 256MB flash memory (no mention of the same problem with Opportunity). Nothing about a priority problem. Huh. Where did I hear that?

See this review and this press release for more info.

A couple of more links
here and here.

At the moment AMD is kicking Intel's arse in the performance sector. The pentium M (Banias) is the only remaining tech that Intel really has. Lots of chickens have come home to roost now that Intel's super-ultra-mega clockspeed boosted chip has reached the end of the line.

For the sake of a continuing healthy, competive market even the most die hard AMD fans had better hope that Intel gets back on track and allows some engineers to actually make some product decisions for a change. The Banias core seems to be their only hope.

I have found all of these recent benchmarks to be rather amazing. It's tough for anything to beat an overclocked Pentium M in games even with the huge disadvantages of an aging platform without all the latest goodies. Intel should be embarrassed. Deeply. Their Pentium 4 is a disgrace.

It is clear that for anyone who cares at all about power consumption, heat, or noise, nothing can touch a Pentium M, not even a Cool n' Quiet enabled 90nm Winchester Athlon64. If Aopen releases a desktop motherboard with the upcoming alviso (PCI-E, DDR2 etc) chipset, things could get very interesting indeed.

Well, I'd be bugged if you did that. Unless all your access points are sitting in exactly the same spot, you'd get better results with 1,4,8, and 11. Power around the sides of a channel is not spread uniformily; and power decreases with distance - so some frequency overlap from channels 1-4 or 4-8 or 8-11 is not bad if they are separated physically.

Try the reverse?

Strangely it looks like Elbrus finally succeded maybe not that way they intended. but ... ;-)

Check out this article at ExtremeTech. If you feel nothing in those diagrams you are not interested in computer science.

Where are you reading $199.98? From the final page of the article:

Deluxe Edition $89.95; Standard Edition $49.95; Open Circulation Edition is free.

a more than made up for it in the years since.

http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,3973,1105259 ,00.asp

nV's tuning was clocking over a thousand points more than when it was blocked. ATI was still cooking their drivers at the time, but only to the tune of a hundred or so points. ATI has since removed any such optimisations from the catalyst drivers.

Yes, this project is only for Europe because DVB is the European broadcast HDTV standard. The U.S. standard is ATSC. If you want an internal HDTV tuner card for the U.S. ATI makes the HDTV Wonder, but it has bad reviews. Also, DVB and ATSC are broadcast standards. These tuners won't work with cable or satellite.

I have to agree with Intel that 64-bit desktops don't make a lot of sense right now.

As an interesting side note, check out this story. It says that Intel reverse engineered the AMD64 architecture (which isn't terribly surprising) but then flat-out copied the documentation, even though some of their implementation didn't match up!

Nice one, guys.

Remember sometime ago Spirit was continously rebooting due to a flash memory problem. The usage of FAT file system in the embedded systems was partly responsible for the mess.

The problem, Denise said, was in the file system the rover used. In DOS, a directory structure is actually stored as a file. As that directory tree grows, the directory file grows, as well. The Achilles' heel, Denise said, was that deleting files from the directory tree does not reduce the size of the directory file. Instead, deleted files are represented within the directory by special characters, which tell the OS that the files can be replaced with new data.

By itself, the cancerous file might not have been an issue. Combined with a "feature" of a third-party piece of software used by the onboard Wind River embedded OS, however, the glitch proved nearly fatal.

According to Denise, the Spirit rover contains 256 Mbytes of flash memory, a nonvolatile memory that can be written and rewritten thousands of times. The rover also contains 128 Mbytes of DRAM, 96 Mbytes of which are used for data, such as buffering image files in preparation for transmitting them to Earth. The other 32 Mbytes are used for code storage. An additional 11 Mbytes of EEPROM memory are used for additional program code storage.

The undisclosed software vendor required that data stored in flash memory be mirrored in RAM. Since the rover's flash memory was twice the size of the system RAM, a crash was almost inevitable, Denise said.

Moving an actuator, for example, generates a large number of tiny data files. After the rover rebooted, the OSes heap memory would be a hair's breadth away from a crash, as the system RAM would be nearly full, Denise said. Adding another data file would generate a memory allocation command to a nonexistent memory address, prompting a fatal error.

Source: DOS Glitch Nearly Killed Mars Rover

BTW, there is another interview of Mike Deliman I read sometime ago in PCWorld.

On the other hand Extremetech's review find the PCIe version much faster

Not true. Extremetech concludes "You can get nearly all of the 6600 GT goodness in an AGP package, and leave very little on the table."

...it's pretty easy, all things considered. Unless the tech has gotten better in the last year or so.

http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,1558,13919,0 0.aspHere's one article that's 2 years old.

Even simple breathing will do the trick of outwitting a capacitive fingerprint scanner.

There are more resources available via Google.

Mass market, affordable biometric systems are far from being foolproof.

I was about to submit this story, oh well. One thing I found interesting was that in their press release they delcare Seattle the "First Wireless Broadband City" which an ExtremeTech article addresses from the start.

Heh, reminds me of this :)

You can refer to recent story on Slashdot Particuly Anandtech comparison. If you want to compare performance : AnandTech (same article) or ExtremeTech.

So don't think Intel had any interest in low power consuption, they were for the gagihertz race. Now tings are changing, they canceled everything (think of 4Ghz) to work "around" the CPU. They surrender to AMD. Race for Gigahertz is over. Dual core is the way to go, particularly specialysed ones.

If you want to reduce your CPU temperature about 20deg C try Athcool on GNU/Linux. It shuts down northbridge went idle. Obviously, you lose 5% performance, but it's your choice. It can be activated at will!

By the way, I'm talking about desktop.

Look at this link to see the performance differences between some codecs. I hope it is just the quicktime implimentation of mpeg4 that is crappy. What about Divx?