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| KickAss
Gear News Archive: May 2002
May 31st Internet and the Law The European Union has actually voted to ban spam email, but the move is unlikely to lighten the load in European inboxes. The plain fact of the matter is that spam is often sent en mass through "slaved" servers, who's operators don't even pay enough attention to see what is happening. Indeed, much spam lies at the boarder between legitimate business and total scam (scam spam). I'm sure all of you who have purchased anything online have been bombarded with spam ranging from growth hormone to weight loss to low-rate mortgages. In a typical day, more than 90% of my email is pure, worthless, irritating spam. So it's nice to see that some governments are irritated enough by it to do something about it, but short of a world-wide ban (which would be impossible), the spammers will always find an unattended, unprotected server somewhere to deliver their noxious payloads through. In an unrelated matter, the FBI has implemented new procedures and assumed new powers to investigate citizens without any evidence of a crime. Thomas Green's scathing piece on the changes is a must read. Basically, you can expect more and more blanket scanning of the internet, and interception of email traffic by the FBI in the future, with programs such as Carnivore, and others. I agree with Green that the September 11th terrorist attacks are now being used as an excuse to undermine civil liberties in the US, and that we are headed back to the days of J. Edgar Hoover. AMD Drops Australian Distributor AMD has terminated it's contract with one of Australia's largest chip distributors, APD International. The split may be related to the recent stories about gray-marketeering of AMD OEM chips. The big story in the news is that the remaining AMD stock held at APD may not be covered by warranty, but this seems a moot point to me. These vast chip quantities can only be OEM equipment (original equipment manufacturer = non-retail, coming in large trays), meaning at best they have a 90 day warranty anyway, and at worst, they have no warranty. To me the news is that AMD was angered enough by something that APD has been doing that they terminated a large and lucrative contract. May 29th AMD Pricing Called Into Question Mike Magee at the Inq. has pointed out the large pricing disparities between "distributor" and "gray market" sources for AMD processors. This is not new stuff, but in the case of AMD processors, the discrepancies seem quite large. Gray market chips are OEM tray version CPUs that make it to market via non-standard distribution channels. Nobody outside of AMD and the gray marketeers really know where and how these non-distributor transactions are made, but it is starting to make companies that buy through the regular "channel" angry, because they can't compete with the gray market prices. AMD would do well to keep this type of distribution to a minimum. OEMs need to be able to sell systems in order to stay in business, and most would rather not buy gray market chips that come without warranty. If more computer companies move to the gray market, AMD may find it's profits in the dumpster. May 28th Doom III Big Hit at E3 Apparently everybody at the E3 conference is talking about the upcoming game DooM III by id software. Screenshots are incredible, and the hype is running very high considering the game is at least 6 months away from being done. But it is clear that the bar has been raised for PC game graphics, and it will be increasingly difficult for other game makers to keep up with id. The best part about the game besides the spectacular graphics is the completely interactive world. The division between animated objects and static background have been removed, and now everything is active. This alone is a major advance for gaming. The bad part, aside from the long wait ahead, is that DooM III will be primarily a single player game. This will limit it's longevity, as was the case with Max Payne, simply because you just can't keep playing the same scripted game over and over again. May 28th Where is the AMD Thoroughbred?? AMD's transition to the 0.13 micron fabrication process, and the resultant "Thoroughbred" version of the Athlon was supposed to be completed in Q2 (2nd quarter) of this year. The mobile version was released for laptop production in April, but the desktop version is still missing in action. Considering that Intel has it's new 0.13 micron Pentium 4 processor on the market, with improved power utilization and maximum operating frequency, it seems odd that AMD has not pushed the Thoroughbred out the door. Time is running out in Q2 2002, so if they are to stay on target, the time is nigh for the desktop debut. The fact that the 64-bit "Hammer" series of processors from AMD is scheduled to come out this Fall, AMD hasn't got much time left to waste if they want to keep the MHz wars going strong. A quick check of our distributors web sites today shows no sign of the new AMD CPUs, which typically means that the debut is still more than 2 weeks away. We'll keep you posted on anything we find out. May 23rd Intel's Sleaze is Showing Memos have surfaced from Intel that show the sleazy side of the IT industry. The memos indicate two things. First, that large corporations not only try to manipulate the news, but they try to manipulate reporters personally as well. Second, it shows that these manipulations are based on bogus quid pro quos, where "special access" is offered as a temptation, but is never given even when reporters capitulate and change the stories they write to be "pro-Intel". We all know in some recess of our minds that corporations pull strings at all levels of society, from bribing government officials to manipulating reporters in any way they can. Some might say this is just business, but obviously if our news and reporters are as tainted by corporate manipulation as a political fundraiser, we aren't getting news, we are getting spin and misinformation. These tactics won't change unless public outrage scares the begeebers out of Intel and other corporate manipulators of the public domain. But most people will never hear about this, let alone voice their displeasure in ways that will get back to Intel. May 22nd Biometrics Scam A very interesting article on biometric security devices appeared over at the Danish web site Heise Online. They actually had the spunk to acquire and test 11 different biometric security devices for PCs, which are meant to prevent unauthorized access to a computer. The results? All 11 devices were beatable, some by extremely simple techniques. While one or two of the devices required some fiddling with phony latex fingerprints or pictures of someone's iris, many could be circumvented by simply placing a piece of tape or baggie over the sensor. As more and more of these devices come into play as "anti-terrorist" security measures, it's high time that companies in the business of security device manufacture come clean on the weaknesses of their systems. Marketing hype, in conjunction with terrorist fears, have driven the sales of these and other highly unreliable biometric systems, offering only a false sense of security. The plain fact of the mater is that biometric appliances can not be relied on to protect airports, computer systems, or any other potential terrorist target. Humans, human-based intelligence and regular old computer passwords, as non-high tech as they are, are the only way to provide a reasonable level of security. Internet Radio Wins Fight Against RIAA. The Recording Industry Association of America's (also know as the Record Label "Pigopoly") attempt to collect 'royalties' from all Internet radio stations that play music has been rejected by the US Register of Copyrights. Regular radio stations don't need to pay such royalties to the Record Labels, so forcing internet radio stations to do so would have been very one-sided. Anytime the RIAA loses one of these battles, we should all be thankful. Microsoft Pushing "MS Licensing 6.0" Now Microsoft is treating licensing schemes like applications and operating systems. They are given version numbers, as if they were an updated piece of software. What rubbish. A license is a license, and this is a blatant (although quite Billy-predictable) attempt to wring more moola out of their captive customers. The threats are flying like food at a high school cafeteria, including warnings that those who don't "opt in", will face far higher upgrade costs in the future. To me this is "protection money", pure and simple. At this point Microsoft isn't just acting like a monopoly, they are acting like an embezzler. "Buy it NOW, or suffer the consequences!" May 20th Microsoft Patch (Not!) Microsoft issued a major patch for Internet Explorer (again!) last week, only to be told by others more knowledgeable about MS operating systems than MS that the patch missed the mark. The email correspondence between Microsoft and BugTraq is most illuminating. Microsoft apparently did not even understand the nature of the bug, nor the correct solution. So the patch you applied last week only addresses one symptom of the problem, and misses the root cause. If you want to check out the email trail, click on the link below. May 15th CD Audio Protection Foiled Again In their never-ending endeavors to prevent you from playing or copying audio CDs on your PC, Record Labels have been implementing new copy/rip protection schemes on new audio CDs. Who knows how many millions they spent on these protection schemes, but it now turns out that the most prevalent protection types can be circumvented with marker pens or tape. It works like this, the idiots who came up with the protection schemes didn't think that the obvious outer track, visible on these new CDs, would be the source of fascination for protection crackers. Obviously, these mysterious new outer tracks had something to do with the protection. Indeed, they are filled with corrupted data that can't be read by PC readers and burners, but should be ignored by home CD players. So if you can block out part of the outer track with tape or a black marker pen, this corrupted data is ignored by PC drives as well. Simple, and quite probably infuriating for the companies that developed the lame technology, as well as the Record Label companies duped into paying for it. May 14th Verisign Under Fire The domain name registrar and secure web services company Verisign is in the news in a bad way, being charged by competitors with "domain slamming". The term domain slamming is meant to analogize with the dastardly phone company practice of duping unsuspecting customers into switching long distance carriers with deceptive tactics. Apparently, Verisign has been sending out mailers to web sites that are registered through competitor registrars like "BulkRegister", and these mailers appear to be renewal notices or invoices. Unwitting companies pay the fee, and are then transferred to Verisign's secure system. We use Verisign, but find such unwholesome business practices despicable. If you can't compete on merit, you shouldn't compete at all. I can only hope that the abysmal press they are getting will help guide them back from the dark side. Matrox Back in the Graphics Game After a long time on the sidelines, Matrox is getting ready to release it's new Parhelia graphics card line. The Parhelia line will be based on a high-end, DX9 compatible graphics chip with 80 million transistors, and many advanced features. It will be the first 512-bit GPU/256-bit DDR graphics card to market, and will support up to 256MB of DDR DRAM on board. It also supports "Surround Gaming" 3-display video technology for spanning 3 monitors. Looks like Matrox has just upped the ante on new graphics cards!! :) May 13th Online Ordering System Good to Go After much effort, and a protracted down-time, our secure online ordering system is up and running again. Thanks to Stephan for a job well done. We will be updating our ordering pages over the next few days. May 10th Microsoft Guilty of Software Piracy Microsoft may have invented the term "software piracy", but only after they were found guilty of it themselves. In an obscure case in French court, Microsoft was found guilty of misappropriating code in the animation program "Softimage" that they had purchased in 1994. The code was written by a French software firm called Syn'X, and when an agreement could not be reached, Microsoft claimed they had removed all the Syn'X code. In fact, they had only removed 1 of 9 functional modules. By 1998 MS bailed and sold SoftImage to Avid. But then in 2001, the French court found MS guilty of intellectual property infringement ("piracy" in MS-speak), and fined them a bit over $400,000 (Bill pocket change). But in a way, it was a victory for MS, because the story never made it into the mainstream press in the US. VIAHardware has Five Things to Say to Intel and AMD There is a nice piece over at VIAHardware on things that both Intel and AMD need to do to stay on track. I agree with just about all 10 suggestions. I might also add that AMD ought to make those new plastic CPU packages easier to open, right now they require super-human effort to gain access to the contents. May 9th May Hardware Watch So what else is new in hardware land besides the upcoming "Opteron" processor from AMD, and the half-baked 3D Labs "Visual Processing Unit"? We are hearing now about NVidia's and ATI's upcoming Direct X 9.0/ OpenGL2.0 graphics cards, slated to be released mid Fall. Also, there is Intel's new 533MHz bus for the Pentium 4, but the word on the street is that no PC1066 Rambus memory is available to populate the new P4 motherboards. Plus there is the little tidbit about Sun Microsystems suggesting they would make Sun servers with AMD Opteron (Sledgehammer) processors when they become available late this year. That can't sit well with Intel. Other little blurbs that have popped up on the web include something about the Opteron reaching speeds of over 3 GHZ (4000+??), and the story that Sony has said that no existing memory technology will be fast enough for it's next game console, including Rambus DRAM and DDR-II. They are working on their own new design. In general, I can say that things are hopping along nicely in hardware land, and the next 6 months should be very very interesting. And what about new games to take advantage of all this new power? I personally am awaiting Unreal Tournament 2003 (June release) and Unreal2 (Sept/Oct release).
May 7th 3D Labs New Graphics Chip There has been quite a buzz about the new "Visual Processing Unit" graphics chip just announced by 3D Labs. The chip, known as the "P10 VPU" is said to be a Direct X9/ OpenGL 2.0 capable graphics chip with over 200 embedded SIMD processors, and the ability to deliver over 170 billion floating point operations per second. If true, NVidia and ATI have some catch up to do. But as always dear friends, read the fine print, even if you need to use your bifocals. The disclaimer at the bottom of the page is most informative: "Various matters set forth in this press release, such as statements relating to the expected benefits and performance of 3Dlabs' P10 VPU and Visual Processing Architecture are forward looking statements. These statements are subject to risks and uncertainties including without limitation, 3Dlabs' ability to manufacture, produce and deliver P10 graphics accelerators in a timely, cost-effective and commercially-viable manner..." Ahhhh, the best laid plans of chips and man. May 5th GeForce4 4400 Review Up I've posted a very quick, mini-review of the Asus V8800, GeForce4 4400 video card with 128MB of DDR DRAM. The card is very nice indeed. Check out how it stacks up against the GeForce3 Ti500. May 3rd How is Windows Like Linux? According to one of Microsoft's expert witnesses in the antitrust trial's penalty phase, both Operating Systems have an un-removable browser built-in. MIT professor and MS apologist Stuart E Madnick suggested as much in his testimony, until grilled by States' attorney Kevin Hodges. The back and forth banter between these two is quite amusing, and shows how bias can blind even smart people to reality. When pressed, Dr. Madnick admitted that KDE and Gnome were not operating systems, but were GUIs (graphical user interfaces) for the Linux operating system, and that they could be removed, thus removing the browser function. When asked if any other operating systems have integrated browsers, he said that KDE and Gnome were examples.... Doh! Well, the simple fact is that no other operating systems for PCs have integrated browsers the way that Windows does. Nor do they have a media player, passport, .Net, a video editing program, a digital picture retouching program, and tons of other bundleware that is meant to leverage market share in particular markets, the way Windows does. Mainly because no one is as much of a megalomaniac as Bill Gates. Will any of this matter when the penalty is finally handed down? Doubtful, unless you believe that justice is still alive and well in the USA. May 1st Dell to Sell AMD Rigs? Naaaaaa! Despite the fact that Michael Dell declared that Dell Computers was looking at potential future "suppliers", the chances are slim to none that Dell will be selling AMD parts any time soon. It's not that Dell thinks that AMD isn't up to snuff, it's that they can't afford to offend mighty Intel. Dell has a very special deal with Intel that it can't afford to threaten. Even with the upcoming AMD "Opteron", the likelihood of Dell Opteron systems ever becoming a reality seems beyond all odds. But the fact that Mr. Dell even spoke such heresy is quite interesting. Copyright 2002, KickAss Gear |