EETimes is reporting that researchers at the University
of Illinois have developed an inexpensive DNA-based sensor that detects
metals. "... the DNA sensors immediately react
to the presence of specific metals by emitting light into an inexpensive
fiber-optic lens."
From AMD's
site:
Description of Issue:
An issue has been identified that could result in the corruption of video
data shared between AGP graphics adapters and AMD Athlon™ or AMD
Duron™ processors when running Microsoft Windows®2000. This issue
is independent of system chipset and has been observed when running Ziff-Davis
3D Winbench™2000 and Mad Onion 3DMark™ 2000 in benchmarking
mode.
Solution:
AMD and Microsoft have worked together to identify a patch that involves
adding a key to the registry. To add the key run the registry key installation
file below or add the registry key as detailed in Microsoft KnowledgeBase
article Q270715. AMD recommends that AMD Athlon and AMD Duron users with
AGP graphics adapters running Windows 2000 install this patch.
This
is an article about the Pentium 4. The only problem is, the author seems
to be to be biased towards AMD, so instead of an informative article,
you get this guy's opinion. If you want some insight into how the darn
thing works, or more like, why this guy thinks it doesn't work as well
as it should, check it
out.
Related
links: Rgister
article
on the above Emulators, Inc. story
Besides the two non-news deals below, there is no news.
You know what they say, "No Gnews is Good Gnews!" ... huh?
All the people I mooch news from
are on vacation, so we have to wait for them to get back before anything
happens...
This is probably more scare/hype than truth (actually...) but worth
a read. If you want to know what the gang
at Redmond have in mind for the comping years, this Register article
does a pretty good job of telling you. Microsoft thinks that the future
(read profit) is in ASP Application Service Providers (not Active
Server Pages, which
is what ASP used to stand for). ASP is where a company stores your
application (software) and data for you (remotely) and you pay a fee to
use the service (run your software and access your data). Only time will
tell if this is a good idea, but it is frought with potential problems,
not the least of which is how often will you be kept from getting anything
done because the "network is down?"
iXBT labs has a few interesting tidbits up today:
They have a cpu roadmap for Intel and AMD
processors for 2001, along with news that AMD's multiprocessor (760MP)
chipset my not be delayed as much as some had expected, with a possible
march-april launch?
They also have news of all sorts of new motherboards coming out, including
Via KT133A (chipset)
versions of the popular Abit KT7(A
now) and my personal fav, Asus A7V.
This is actually two stories from the Reg:
"Sneaky
cable crypto scheme in the works"
This story is about how the Cable Television Laboratories (the industrie's
R & D arm) is proposing a scheme which would allow cable providers
to control how many times, if ever, you are allowed to record a program.
The cable industry would require a "DFAST" chip in VCR's and
recording devices in order for them to be compatible with digital cable.
This would basically make it so viewers would have to pay each time they
want to view programming they recorded.
"CPRM
on hard drives"
CPRM is basically a proposal to have media (like cd-roms) contain a hidden
area known as "vendor space" in which a key or other code would
be written on a disk. The CPRM drive just writes around this area, making
it invisible to the user and operating system. When the CPRM drive is
asked for verification, it can go read a key, or serial number or whatever
out of the vendor space.
If you haven't figured it out, CPRM could raise a lot of problems... read
the Reg story for the details.
The web's favorite wonderboy, Anand has done a write up comparing the
latest chipsets. This article is mainly a comparison of DDR SDRAM and
regular (SDR) SDRAM on Athlon systems, and it shows that the Athlon as
it stands doesn't really benefit that much ( roughly 10% in most benchmarks)
from DDR. What the Athlon does benefit from, however is higher front-side-bus
(fsb) frequencies.
I think it's interesting how the more "legitimate" Anand gets,
the more he tries to distance himself from the overclocking community:
"Also, the board was not stable at FSB frequencies
far above 133MHz so we could not do any overclocking tests"
Related
links:
Correction - 1/13/01: Ok, I just figured out that the "ApolloPro"
series chipsests are for Intel processors and the KX133, KT133 and KT133a
chipsets are for AMD processors.
In a futile attempt to "scoop" slashdot,
I have found this
article on New Scientist. It describes how a team from UC
Santa Barbara has developed a way to emit single photons without the
usual background noise. Single photon emission is thought to be a key
part of secure key transmission and quantum computing. I don't know what
those are .
I should probably stick to the news mooching business...
btw - speaking of those 1337-ists over at /.,
they have a link to an article
on MSNBC about "one-handed keyboards." Every guy who uses
a computer can see the benefit of a one-handed keyboard and why slashdotters
are SO interested in these things... (search
for keyboard, and you'll see what I mean).
WPCREdit is a program from H-Oda
that lets you mess with your chipset's settings from windows. For more
information on what it does, read the review.
This review deals with the KT133 chipset.
Ace's
Hardware has put up an article detailing Intel's
plans for 2001. In a related story (on Ace's) there's some talk now of
"SMT" (see The
Mysteries of Jackson Technology) SMT is basically a second logical
processor on a single die. "An SMT capable
CPU is basically a Out of Order CPU that also can schedule and issue multiple
instructions of several independent threads each cycle." This
is mostly speculation based on some comments by an Intel presentation,
but definitely interesting stuff.
Related
links: Register
article: Intel to push RAMBUS hard in 2001
with the DDR version of the Brookdale chipset (Pentium 4 chipset with
SDRam support) not scheduled to arrive until Q1 2002, Intel has
not choice but to push RAMBUS memory with their Pentium 4 cpu's.
GamePC
has a (16 page) guide to overclocking the Pentium 4. If you have a few
(cough) bucks to spare, perhaps a Pentium 4 is for you. (Don't make me
remind you that Intel is revamping the Pentium 4 to a different pin layout
in Q3 2001). But if you absolutely must have the fastest MHz chip out
there, even if it isn't the best performer, then
maybe an overclocked P4 is for you.
Carnivore is the codename for the software the FBI allegedly
uses to intercept email and other digital information. Apparently, it
has a nice GUI interface and is really easy to use. Read
on, crazy diamond...
In cpu & chipset news, The Register has put up another article with
Intel's plans and prices for 2001. Check it out.
Related
links: Register
story
Pentium 3 not long for this world - Intel is planning to ditch (stop selling)
the Pentium 3 and move everyone to Pentium 4's (by the end of 2001?).
But this story on NY Times ("free"
registration required... ugh!) details how many web companies are making
the move away from banner advertising. What are they doing instead? Full-page
"gateway" ads that you have to load and see before you're allowed
to proceed. Yeah, sweet.
If you think about it, It was only matter of time before things came to
this. Banner ads are totally ineffective and people gotta get paid, so
you gotta see more ads or buy more stuff I guess...
I'm sure some unscrupulous webmasters will find ways to not let you bypass
the ad (MSNBC has a "take me directly to the business section"
link above the ad so you don't have to wait, but you still have to load
it). Anyway, I'm sure some web sites will hide the content so you HAVE
to see the ad and you won't be able to link straight-in...
Makes me long for the "good-ol' days" of the web... "When
I was your age..."
Oh snap. There it is baby!
And to think, all it took was a 25 cent resistor!
What's the meaning of all this?
I'll tell ya: Right now I run an AMD Athlon
(thunderbird) 700 cpu. When I purchased it, I has set the goal of 950MHz
(hence Project 950), but alas, the fastest I could get it to run at was
918MHz where I've been since September.
Uh huh...
Now that school's over, I have some free time on my hands, so I ordered
the little resistor necessary to do the voltage mod to the A7V (motherboard).
See, the A7V limits the voltage (Vcore) to no greater than 1.85 Volts.
The default for the Athlon is 1.70V. Anyway, more volts means more MHz,
so you need to solder a little resistor to the motherboard to allow higher
voltages.
btw - the machine was rock-solid (stable) at 918MHz... we'll see how stable
it is... and how long the cpu lasts??? Oh well, the 700 has been discontinued
and is under $90 if you can find one, so if I blow it, I'll just buy a
new one, right?!
Moral of the story?
If you're considering an upgrade and you're on a budget, overclocking
an Athlon is the way to go, in my opinion.
And in case you couldn't figure it out, this kind of mod totally voids
your warranty .
Related
links: Millisec.com
Sells those 24kΩ resistors you need.
James was kind enough to email me and tell me that Tweakmeister
has a new
article up about how to tweak Windows. Seriously, if I had the time
(and er... skill) I would love to do articles like this.
This is what this site was supposed to be about... now it's degraded to
a pile on which I rant about pr0n and
microsoft.
This article covers the basics, msdos.sys and system.ini files, the registry,
VxD's, the file system and virtual memory. It really is a good article.
I'll put it on the links page so you can find
it if you ever need it.
btw - on an unrelated note: On my info page,
I talk about how "clean" my home page is and how cluttered PCWorld
is and how they have over 800 links on their front page. I just went over
there and they've cleaned up their site quite a bit (using "tabs"),
while this page probably has over 300 links on it. Just a little ironic.
I probably get more hits than PCWorld, so it's all relative I guess.
According
to the Reg, Intel
will be cutting prices across the boards (as it does every year the 4th
week of Jan). If you're thinking about the Pentium 4 (why?), keep in mind
the packaging (and more) changes that Intel will introduce now in Q3,
2001? "Tualatin-256s at over 1.26GHz and Celerons
at over 900MHz will arrive in Q1 of next year, while Intel is preparing
the ground for its Northwood launch by offering Willamette (P4) frequency
parity between the 478 and the 423 pin packaging now in Q3, in preparation
for a launch at over 2GHz in Q4 next year" See the Reg
story for specific prices and keep an eye out over on Ace's
as they might put up an article with more details.
I'm
just passing-on stuff from other sites, but around gaming circles, this
is kinda big. If only becausae 3dfx used to be the king of the hill for
3d video cards. There were rumors
about this possible takeover a few months ago, but now it looks like
it actually happened. 3dfx has been doing poorly and Nvidia has been introducing
new cutting-edge video card "generations" every 6 months. Nvidia
is set to release it's next generation "NV20" product soon (launch
is scheduled for Feb 27,2001). Read
on. Related
links: Nvidia press
release
Thresh's
Firing Squad
FS did an interview with Brian Burke of Nvidia concerning the acquisition.
VoodooExtreme
Billy always has the low-down on the video-card industry.
3D
Spotlight has a litle guide for tewaking Internet explorer (5). This
guide basically walks you through all the little features and options
in ie5. Definitely worth a look-see.
Related
links: Tweak Central's Paranoid ie5 user's page
Learn how to tighten the screws on your security settings and stop garbage
like pop-up windows, cookies, Scripting and ActiveX.
Microsoft
Internet explorer page
Is it part of the OS, is it a browser: Make up your damn mind. I guess
it's what best suits you at any given time in the legal battle against
the DOJ...
"Apart
from its uses in embedded systems, Inferno provides facilities for developing
distributed applications which can be run on a wide range of platforms
including Linux, Solaris, Plan 9 and Windows. Instead of end users having
to install the whole Inferno system, this plug-in enables any Windows
user to run an Inferno application by means of a one-off download of less
than 1 Mb. Inferno binaries are both compact and platform-independent
and can easily be downloaded on-the-fly."
This
article discusses using superconductive materials at temperatures
as low as 5K and achieving speeds of up to 750GHz. The article basically
discusses future microprocessor materials and design. Very interesting
stuffs.
"Darrell Boggs, Intel's principal engineer
for the desktop platform group, told delegates at the Micro-33 conference
in Monterey that the original P4 design would have been too large to
build economically at 0.18 micron and that the design was compromised
in order to minimise power consumption and to reduce the die size to
that of the original Pentium Pro"
The article goes on to talk about the Pentium 4's architecture and sacrifices
made for feasability and cost. I dig this kinda stuff. Related
links: Original IEEE
article
with all the details
Windows98 central -
seems to be a site about Windows98. They also have a sister-site: WindowsME
Central, which suprisingly seems to be about WindowsME. Notice how
these guys are slaves to Microsoft's marketing team and have to register
a new domain-name every 6 months... ugh. Not to monday-morning-quarterback,
but this guy should've just got "central.com" and went with
subdomains like "win98.central.com" and stuff...
Anyway, the guy who runs these is a madman... he has fresh news on like
3 sites at least... go take-a-pull.
I just found out he has another site, Win2kCentral:
guess what that's about...
CMPTR.com - Lots of news, some
articles about Hard-drives... This guy seems to have something against
vowels. I assume he would be pretty good at the "license-plate
game."
TweakMeister.com - Good tweak
site, updated recently, which is good. Probably more overclockin' than
twaekin' goin on around here, but that's hardware tweakin' I guess...
Not a tweak site, but interesting: HowStuffWorks.com - Not
to sound like a lame-ass, but I had an idea similar to this a few years
ago, but I didn't know "how stuff works" and I didn't want to
give people the wrong information, and then they would like be at a party
and try to sound smart, and... well...
In real news, WIRED is reporting
that some Hotmail users are having problems.
The report is entitled, "You get what you pay for." Personally,
I hate Hotmail and wish it would die. But the best I can hope for I guess
is that some people would realize how much it sucks. Any chance I get
to rip on Hotmail, I will. That's just just obvious. Related
links: CNet News
article
on the Hotmail outages
If you don't know why I hate Hotmail so much, you probably think AOL
NEW version 6.0! is cool too. Really, I'm just kiddin'... Hotmail
is fine... I just acting like I'm ranting and raving...
"I graudated."
"I know, and just a hair under a decade."
"A lot of people go to school for eight-and-a-half years..."
"Yeah, they're called doctors!"
If you didn't get the above dialog, it's from Tommy
Boy, go rent it.
Anyway. I finished my last exam today. With any luck I will have my B.S.
in Computer Science in the mail by March.
Since I can't get a job, at least my parents will be happy. They didn't
think they'd live to see the day...
Perhaps when I finally get my degree or whatever, I can start a web-site
which tells the TRUTH about a certain particular school (or schoools)
and lets users exchange opinions about said school.... But maybe I should
keep my mouth shut until my degree is in-hand.
HYPE source: the web I guess
12/11 - 22:11
I guess it wouldn't be Monday without some hype.
This VorbisOrbis or whatever
is starting to get some play...
First it was here,
then CNet,
then slashdot. They are trying to replace
mp3 with a royalty-free version. I guess if you encode or transmit an
"mp3" file, you have to pay some German company (not RAMBUS,
I know, you'd think...) royalties.
And slashdot is all about "P2P" - personally if I ever catch
someone saying "anything2anything", I punch them in the face
for being an idiot .
If they follow it with the word "space," I usually kick them
in the groonies for good-measure. Anyway...
This is BitHive. A peer-to-peer
file exchange that somehow uses IRC. Wow? Cool logo tho. Yeah, IRC is
the last bastion of nerd-dom that I have yet to invade. At the rate I'm
moving, I'm sure it's just a matter of time...
Related
links: [H]ardOCP
I remember back when OCP used to stand for something!
In a related note: I finally got around to ordering some 24kΩ resistors
to do the voltage mod
to my A7V. We'll see if we can't get this 918MHz up to 1+GHz?
In an unrelated note: With any luck, TC should
push through 60,000 hits tonight. I just wish I could turn off the script
I run to boost my hits.
It looks like these guys actually know they're stuff... I'll try to get
these links in the links section ASAP (read "12/15").
Hey, if you're over at 3D Rage, tell
these guys to lose the "GameBoy lips"
from their logo, will ya?
It
seems that Asus is the first company
to get a third-party (non-Intel) motherboard
out for the Pentium 4 processor. The P4T is based on the Intel i850 Pentium
4 chipset and supports (requires) RAMBUS RAM. The board seems to do well,
and for you mad overclockers, GamePC got a 1.4GHz chip to 1.652GHz, and
a 1.5GHz chip to 1.725GHz... The P4 tops the charts on some of the benchmarks,
but probably not by enough to justify it's relatively large price premium.
I still recommend AMD Athlon processors for
sub $5,000 machines .
btw - A nice fellow in my CS417 class was able to get his cgi to work,
and it turns out that the problem was because I was compiling the (simple)
C program on a SUN Solaris box and the web-server runs on an Intel LINUX
box. As soon as I recompiled the C program on the LINUX box, everything
works fine.
See how easy that was? And to think: you could've gotten a free web-site
for that! Albeit a pretty crappy one .
This has got to be the coolest little
news tid-bit I've seen in a while.
HSV
Technologies Inc., of San Diego, California is developing a non-lethal
weapon that uses ultraviolet laser beams to harmlessly immobilize people
and animals at a distance. The Phaser-like device uses two beams of UV
radiation to ionize paths in the air along which electrical current is
conducted to and from the target. In effect, the beams create wires through
the atmosphere wherever they are pointed.
From JC's, "Word
from c't has it that AMD will be dropping
their prices on the 14th of December. The 1.00GHz Athlon, for instance,
will be going down from $350 to $182."
NICE. With DDR motherboards being released within the next few weeks/months,
you should be in upgrade heaven.
This
article on Wired reveals that man Mac OS-X
(10) beta users are tweaking the OS to make it more like previous versions
of Mac OS. The article has opinions from many users who don't want to
break their old habits and some who say that the more they use OSX, the
more they like it.
Maybe Mac users aren't all emotional volkswagen-driving zealots afterall?
No gnews is good gnews source: n/a
12/04 - 15:44
Nothing's going on in the computer biz. The P4 is a dud. Some people
are recommending users hold-out for a better price/performance solution.
The AMD 760 (DDR) chipset has been delayed. I think for a couple of months.
I guess Thresh has a "buying
guide: The Deals" up. It's basically, how to be "cool like
us." I looked through there and it will basically "show you
the ropes," as far as being a computer-guy (read nerd).
Put it this way, if you needed say, a new video-card, and your first inclination
is to go to your local computer shop or office store, you DEFINITELY need
to read this article. But if you're thinkin' "why would I want a
new video card?" you're probably not nerdy enough.
btw: If anyone knows Perl/CGI and can tell me what's wrong with
my stupid script, I would be internally, oops a little "dubya"
slippin' out there... eternally grateful. I may even put you at the top
of the list to receive this web site if I ever get a real job.
I just need the script to send info via STDIN/STDOUT to/from a "c"
program running on this APACHE server. It works fine from the command-promt,
but the WEB version isn't returning any information. Which leads me to
believe it's a permissions problem, but I haven't a clue.
The script sends the values "5" and "6" to the c program,
which multiplies them together and returns "30." I know this
is baby-stuff, but if I can get this to work, I can modify it do the assignment...
Seriously, I am in need of help ASAP, so please
. THANK YOU!
information
Best tweak sites
This
is an article about the Pentium 4. The only problem is, the author seems
to be to be biased towards AMD, so instead of an informative article,
you get this guy's opinion. If you want some insight into how the darn
thing works, or more like, why this guy thinks it doesn't work as well
as it should, 
!
.
VoodooExtreme
I'm
just passing-on stuff from other sites, but around gaming circles, this
is kinda big. If only becausae 3dfx used to be the king of the hill for
3d video cards. There were 
Microsoft
Internet explorer page
"Apart
from its uses in embedded systems, Inferno provides facilities for developing
distributed applications which can be run on a wide range of platforms
including Linux, Solaris, Plan 9 and Windows. Instead of end users having
to install the whole Inferno system, this plug-in enables any Windows
user to run an Inferno application by means of a one-off download of less
than 1 Mb. Inferno binaries are both compact and platform-independent
and can easily be downloaded on-the-fly."
"I graudated."
.
If they follow it with the word "space," I usually kick them
in the groonies for good-measure. Anyway...
It
seems that 
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