The thought of what our lives would be like without the technology we have today is a common thought for us. The nostalgia of the 90s is hard not to laugh at and enjoy. Someone took this one step further and made a parody of the show 24. It portrays what the "high-end" technology would consist of back in 1994. Definitely worth a few laughs. They use landlines, dial up modems, pagers, payphones, dot matrix printers, and hourly Internet rates to name a few. How did anyone accomplish anything?
AMD's Phenom and Spider platform previews are weaving their way across the web today. We'll be updating this story link as more previews come pouring in...
Earlier today, AMD's press release detailed the culmination of their acquisition of ATI. They announced their all AMD platform, which is codenamed "Spider". Spider plans on combining the 7-Series chipsets, the HD3800 GPUs, and the Phenom quad-core processors into one cohesive platform with a good price point. Unfortunately, full availability is slated for H1 2008. Until then, check out their new CPU prices effective today , or read up at Tom's for their fascinating forty-two page low-down on the hardware itself. They definitely put those engineering samples to the test. It looks like AMD has not topped Intel yet, but they are at least moving forward with their new architecture after many delays. AMD is vital to the competitive nature of the dynamic duo. If they are to stay afloat and compete with Intel, this quad themed platform needs to work. The recent capital they acquired is estimated to get them through another six months of operation.
"...The exhaustion in the faces of our editors in the Munich lab is a
testament to the hard work they've put into this article over the past
few hours and days. We tested all three models of the new processor, the Phenom 9700, Phenom 9600 and Phenom 9500
, running each of them through our benchmark suite. Along with the
Phenom processor, AMD is also presenting its "AMD OverDrive" tool.
With the new 7-series chipset family, consisting of the 790FX,
790X and 770, AMD is simultaneously unveiling the Spider platform. Up
to four graphics cards can be set up as a Crossfire X configuration
using the new 790FX chipset..."
Bert Töpelt- Tom's Hardware
Keeping step with many firsts, JAXA (once again) has never before seen footage of the moon in HD. This time around, they have published a video with a Earth Rise and an Earth Set. This is well worth watching, and it offers a great perspective on how large our galaxy really is. Information on the video can be found here
Just when AMD starts firing on all cylinders (Series 7 chipsets, PCIe 2.0, Radeon HD3xxx), a nasty issue pokes its head out of the woodwork. AMD discovered their Phenom 9700 2.4ghz CPU's have an issue with TLB errata that is related to the L3 protocol.When running certain client workloads, this errata can cause platform independant system hangs. Without the microcode update advantages of the Intel microarchitecture, AMD is forced to release BIOS updates for existing Phenom platforms. Until this errata is corrected, Phenom 9700's will be removed from the shelves. The Inquirer Reports...
"AMD WILL ONLY LAUNCH the Phenom 9500 and 9600. Even though the channel already got its hands on the Phenom 9700 (2.4 GHz) part, it will have to be pulled off from the shelves.
In a weird deja-vu, it turns out that the company found an errata in the TLB (Transition Lookaside Buffer), just like Intel did earlier this year with complete Core marchitecture. However, unlike Intel, that has a micro-code update function in all of its CPUs, AMD is forced to delay the introduction of the part.
This comes as a huge hit to AMD, at the time that evrything was looking somewhat better. On paper and in practice, its Chipsets Series 7 are world's finest at the moment - PCIe Gen2 implementation is near-perfect, old Athlon 64 X2 parts got a new life on them (insane HyperTransport overclocking options), while Radeon HD 3850 and 3870 are once again sparking a huge war in world of 3D graphics."
An interesting turn of events as an Abu Dhabi firm invests some much needed capital into AMD for an 8.1% stake in the company. Hopefully AMD can combine their gains from ATI and this money boost to pull the ailing corporation out of its slump. An Intel world without competition would not be advantageous.
"With oil prices surging and U.S. stock prices slumping, chip maker
Advanced Micro Devices Inc.'s sale of an 8.1 percent stake to the Abu
Dhabi government's investment arm represents the latest plunge by a
wealthy Middle Eastern nation into a troubled U.S. corporation.
It
also raises fresh questions about the appropriateness of Middle Eastern
firms owning large chunks of U.S. businesses that specialize in
advanced technologies.
Sunnyvale-based AMD, the world's No.
2 microprocessor maker, needs the $622 million investment from the
Mubadala Development Company to help lift the company out of a deep
financial slump.
AMD has lost more than $1.6 billion so
far this year, and has just $1.5 billion in cash on hand as it works to
pay down $5.3 billion in debt. The financial woes have caused AMD's
stock to fall more than 35 percent since the start of the year, a slide
that has wiped out nearly $4 billion in shareholder wealth.
The
infusion, announced Friday, is a necessary jolt for AMD is it hunts for
money to fund its counteroffensive against Intel Corp., the world's
largest chip maker, and amid a huge spike in investments in U.S.
companies from Middle Eastern nations..." JORDAN ROBERTSON
Amazon, the world's largest online retailer of books, is now entering the E-Book market with its very own branded E-Book Reader, The Kindle. Apart from the fact that the E-Book format has never really gone anywhere, along with the fact that the print business is experiencing a moderate surge in this day of supposed paperless (yeah right) lifestyles, we have to wonder exactly who Amazon expects to pony up for this $399 device.
Coming in a roughly 5x7.5 inch form factor with a 6-inch 600x800 display, and sporting a massive (this is blatant sarcasm) 256MB of internal storage, It raises the question, who in their right mind would pay the estimated $399 Amazon expects? Rounding out the specs, it does posess a standard SD card slot for memory expansion and supports Wi-Fi and EVDO data services, though it lacks support for open document formats.
A $400 device I can use to read electronic books that usually cost as much as a paperback on sale? With a 6-inch E-Ink screen, and a form factor larger than your average PDA? No support for open document formats? Where do we sign up!
Amazon, drop us an email when your device has a better screen and costs at least a little less than 50 paperbacks. We'd suggest something like an Archos 605 Wi-Fi instead. Their 160GB model (apart from having over 600 times the storage capacity of The Kindle) features a touch screen with nearly the same resolution (800x480..and it's color), support not only for open documents formats and web browsing (at an additional cost) but video and audio as well.
For the same price, we'd rather carry around 159GB of video and audio and a few E-Books too. Or purchase a laptop.
This is hubris on steroids.
{correction: What seems to be incorrect from the initial
reports of the device is third-party format support. The Kindle is
compatible Microsoft Word, HTML, TXT, JPEG, GIF, PNG, and BMP files,
however not the popular PDF format out of the box. Amazon will convert
PDF files to the Kindle format if they are sent to the company via
e-mail.....addendum courtesy of Betanews}
As proof positive of the relative disconnect mainstream media experiences on the Internet, multi-billion dollar news organization CNN is now outranked in sheer web traffic by...a torrent search engine. Mininova.org surpassed CNN in September. As can be seen from the accompanying Alexa graph, mininova traffic continues to skyrocket well above the worlds #1 news organization. It seems that people are more interested in the next episode of CSI than the 2008 Presidential Election. The Inquirer reports...
"The honor of beating one of world's leading news sites goes to staffers from Mininova.org, who overtook CNN.com back in mid-October, but now it seems that ThePirateBay.org is also on the move. Lads from TPB.org just overtook News.com, and are on a way to overtake CNN.com as well.
In order to get the traffic back, Foxnews.com could consider introducing torrent search on its site."
Last week, FastSilicon.com reported the image leaked by Chilehardware. At the time, the validity of the image was questionable. Today we were able to access the full document and confirm that the diagram came from AMD. Go here for resampled and enlarged images of the new diagram.
The Internet has vastly broadened the
level of discourse in the world. No one can deny this, however, much
of this discourse involves inane behavior, kindergarten level banter,
and a lot of," You suck troll!!". It is clear that since
the onslaught of Eternal
September back in 1993, Net content has become much
less intelligent. It is with this in mind that Gabriel
Ortiz and Paul
Starr started a new Open Source initiative,
StupidFilter. StupidFilter
promises to employ techniques, such as Bayesian filtering and rules
processing, to allow blogs and browsers to detect stupidity in
progress. We think it is very ironic (not to mention damned
hilarious) that a few lines of code could outthink your average
testosterone challenged, uncivil Netizen. Are computers smarter than
we thought, or are people just less intelligent than we ever
imagined?
"The concept behind the StupidFilter Project originated during a conversation between Gabriel Ortiz and Paul Starr. StupidFilter was conceived out of necessity. Too long have we suffered in silence under the tyranny of idiocy. In the beginning, the internet was a place where one could communicate intelligently with similarly erudite people. Then, Eternal September hit and we were lost in the noise. The advent of user-driven web content has compounded the matter yet further, straining our tolerance to the breaking point."
