Sir, your Laptop is on Fire, Vista Delayed (again)? & Could you please speak into the PC?

Over the last few days I've discovered a lovely site called BoingBoing. If you will recall in the last post I rerferenced it for a story about the Core 2 Duo Chips. Anyways, it's an interesting site about odd stuff. They have interesting things on everything from writing on water to a giant fish. But I digriss. It's now added to the link's sidebar and feel free to visit it. Moving onto today's news.

Sir, your Laptop is on Fire
Back a few months ago there was a story about a Dell laptop catching on fire at a Japanese conference. The cause is not clear however it's kind of disturbing that it happened a bit more than a month later. Heh, You'd think Dell would learn from it's mistake's don't you? Well the fact that it recalled over 35,000 batteries would be kind of reashuring.Not really. It happened again Apperently according to a fourm post by an eyewitness the battery burned through the table and that's what was on fire. Now consider the fact that the battery is made of Lithium. Lithium is a very flammable metal. Imagine if that Laptop was being used in something like the Post Office where there's lots and lots of papeMy parents have a Dell 6000 they bought this past winter. It's a bit hot on the legs and I wonder if it'll ever explode. I'm typing on a Dell, my sister has a Dell. What if this doesn't just affect Laptop's? That would not be good news. Are entire network would be down. In 5 years we have bought 3 dells, and it's only crashed on us 1 or 2 times. Other than that we've had only minor problems with them. But this raises some interesting questions. If Dell quality is suffering from quality issues then Dell needs to reexamine itself and see if it needs to refocus prorities. I will now avoid using my parents Laptop and hope to goodness that Apple has fixed all the problems with they're Macbooks, when I eventually get around to getting one.
Vista Delayed? (Again)
This entire Windows Vista thing is getting way out of hand. First they cut half to three quaters of the features because of "deadlines". Then they decide that they're going to delay Vista to the begining of 2007. Fine. It gives the consumer more time to decided if he/she wants to blow $100-500 on a new OS. But now they're thinking of delaying it again. There is rampant speculation that Vista will be delayed once more due to problems in the codebase. My quesiton is when will Microsoft commit to a firm launch date. Vista is late as it is. XP is reaching for it's 6th birthday, one of the oldest Operating system's in Microsoft history, if not the oldest. My question is: When will they make up thier minds and get the ball rolling? But the height of the irony is, I think many people will go "Oh Vista, well that's nice". People I think, could care less about Vista and will stick with XP until support for it is dropped sometime in the next few years. Even more users would probably switch over to a Linux distro of the users preference. The most popular Linux distro right now is Unbuntu, which has a complete productivity suite set up for you. It includes Open Office, Firefox and the GIMP. So why wait for Vista to shell out hundreds of bucks when you can get an OS that is much more secure and guess what? It's Free. So why wait for Vista? Get Unbuntu.
Sir, Please speak into the PC
The theme of this post so far has been Odd- Rational and then now I'm continuing on with another Odd piece of news again from BoingBoing. Back a little while ago on digg, there was a story about the top ten Computer Setups. They're where some really cool ones there like the Wing, the ultimate Mac setup and the wall-o-monitors set up. The one I would like to focus on today is the whiskey bottle setup which is nothing short of amazing. Someone managed to cram a P3 733 Pentium Processor, 256 notebook RAM a 40 GB hard drive into a whiskey bottle. Going back to BoingBoing someone decided that he liked the old Shure 55 mic's, used most noteably by Elvis. The blogger got kind of creative and decided to put a PC into a Shure 55 made out of wood. The specs are not on the site but the shear coolness of putting a PC into something as small as a microphone. There was as PC a few months back that was completly wireless and was the size of a microprocessor. I can't find the link right now, but If I do I'll add it in later

Later,
Nathaniel

Round Up: Core 2 Launch, Editorial: The Failure of AOL

Core 2 Duo Finally Arrives

Well they're finally here. The new Core 2 chips made my Intel have made they're way into the mainstream. The Core Two Duo chips codenamed Conroe(Desktop) and Merom(Mobile) respectivly, are set to replace the year and a half old Yonah first gen Core Duo chips. This puts the silicon crown back on Intel's head as these chips just shoot way ahead of anything that AMD has the market as of yet. The main feature of these new chips is not the clock speed but the L2 cache. For all you non-geeks out there the L2 cache is the part of the processor that does the repative tasks. For example, if your visiting something like BoingBoing, instead of retriving the data from memory the data will be stored in cache which will decrease the load times. The new Core 2 chips have a 4 MB cache that is shared between the two cores. However when using most programs, only one core is used and therefore you have full use of the 4 MB cache, increasing speed even more. The chips range in price and speed from 1.86 ($183) to 2.93 Ghz ($999) Rumours suggest that Intel is working on a 3.2 Ghz version as well as a single core version coming later on this year or early next year. My main question is this: How will this affect Apple? Will all the Macs be pushed up from the new chips. I would love to see the Mac Mini pushed to 1.8 Ghz or over and it wouldn't hurt to see the Macbook's and iMac's pushed up a bit either. I'll wait a little while before getting my Mac to see what gets a speed boost. It should be interesting to see what AMD follows up with especially now that AMD has aqquired ATI.
In more personal news I went through my first shift at work today. To say the least the staff are a tad quarky. But the job is fun since you get to walk around and help people. I managed my first sale within the first two hours and things where pretty steady. The staff are a bit.....crazy to stay the least but the money's good and the hours are good. So I hope to stick with it into the fall.

AOL: The Notable Web Failure

Is anyone here familiar with AOL? Anyone? Anyone living? Well all I can tell you is that AOL is one of the worst ISP's in the world today. Take the case of one Mr. Vinceant Farrari, an AOL cutomer who decided to cancel his account. He wasn't sour to AOL he just didn't use it. But the entire thing spending 22 minutes trying to cancel his account really ticked him off. And that's just he customer support. The software the AOL uses for it's browser is not great either. The UI is horrible and the experience is just "blah" in the word of a highly reliable source. (You know who you are.) And the fact is AOL is charging more for dail-up than for broadband! What's that for? I can understand the higher costs of maintaining Dail-Up networks but when your paying $15-16 for broadband and paying 1.5-2 times for half the service! But the fact is, AOL wasn't always that way. Before the merger with Time Warner, AOL was a pretty decent service. That fact is when a smaller company gets aborbed by a larger one one of two things usually happen. Profits go way, way up and quality goes down down *splat*. That's what happened to AOL. That's what could happen to companies like Aliant and Eastlink. The quality goes down down down while profits go up up, up. Until customers are presented with a third option, then the entire userbase jumps ship and usually the company goes bankrupt. And that's the direction in which AOL is headed unless it cleans up it's act of things like horrible customer support, and bribing bloggers.
Well that's my rant for tonight
Nathaniel

Roundup: ATI and AMD=AMT?, Review: The new Digg Labs & Scotty set for Space

ATI + AMD= AMT?
Not this is new news but guess what? ATI and AMD have merged with is a fancy way of saying, ATI has been swallowed up by AMD. Now I love AMD, don't get me wrong. However I don't aprove of major US companies thinking that they can swallow up Canadian companies cheaply. Now in AMD's case it will cost them $5 bilion and about 70 shares of there stock to buy ATI. So what does the tech world and the market have to gain? Well hopefully better chipsets for AMD motherboards and better processors from AMD as they are allowed to tap into ATI's coperate secrets. However it also works the other way. ATI will be able to make superious chipsets for motherboards for AMD as well as increase the performance in the graphics card lines. So it works both ways. However there has been a second development while I've been trying to get this through the publishing process. Intel has revocked ATI's chipset license. So what this basically means is that any and all mainboards that are made by Intel can no longer have ATI chips put in the them by default. However you can go out and buy an ATI graphics card to put in your PC. However insiders tell various news sources that Intel has not revoked ATI's chipset license. So this could be interesting. If Intel does (or did) revoke ATI's chipset license it's not the end of the world. All it means is that ATI chipsets will only go into AMD motherboards. And then there are motherboards manufactered by third parties.
The one major thing that could come out of this could be that Vista, as well as all other major future operating system could become more interoperable. Think of it thisway. The motherboard could be designed in such as way that the graphics card and the proccesor work together to enhance both the speed and the graphics performance of Vista. But who knows? Anything can happen.
Review: The New Digg Labs
As part of it's upcoming API, digg has launched it's two new users app's today. Called Swarm and Stack the apps are meant to enhance the way diggers know which stories are getting the most diggs (stack) and how many users are interested in a story (swarm) Launched last night the two apps together are in a new section of the site called digg labs. But enough banter onto the review
Stack

As mentioned above, Digg stack is meant to show a more detailed view of dugg stories. This is a novel concept and the UI of stack is quite nice. However I have 2 complaints. First the page does not render properly in Firefox. If Kevin Rose had anything to do with this project, he would not have let this detail go unnoticed. Another problem with Digg stack is the unability to go back to stories that have passed. When active digg stack moves actively to the left. And with all the digg comming in at times it's hard to click on a certain story. You can however pause the stack and click on a story. When you click on as story as well as a link to source page, you get a history of diggs per hour. This is very useful information. What I would like to see in stack sooner rather than later is the ability to digg a story within stack. Currently you must either have a tab/window open within the main section of digg and then search for the story within the specified container. You should be able to log into Digg within Digg labs and digg stories within stack. My third suggestion/critisism is that you should be able to review the stack. For example you should be able to go back through stack and see stories that have already gone by.
I love the idea of stack and it's much more effective than browsing through digg manually. Good Job Digg! 3.5/5
Swarm
I haven't spent as much time with swarm although I have gotten a feel for it. Like stack, it's meant to give users an idea of what stories are popular and what stories aren't. Swarm gives you an idea of how many users are viewing a story at any given time. Although not put into porportion. An interesting idea swarm can be very overwhelming. I clicked into my swarm tab to see dozens of stories with hundreds of little yellow things (users) floating around them. It was very overwhelming. So if I had to pick between swarm and stack I would pick stack. I find stack to be a bit more of clean interface as well as a bit more clarity and detail in terms of what information is provided. 3/5
Keep up the Good work Kevin!
Scotty's ashes to be shot into Space
Actor James Doohan's ashes will be shot into space this fall. They where supposed to be shot in space last year, however the launch that was supposed to shoot the ashes into space unable to launch because of tests on the rocket. Doohan's widow Wende (Doohan) said that James' final wish was to actually go into space. In 2004 he received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. A little known fact about Doohan is that he was a member of the Canadian Armed Forces and invaded the beaches with the 1st Canadian Division on DDay. He killed two german snipers, and did considerable damage to the germans before being shot six times by a german machine gun. Four times in the leg, once in the chest, and once in the finger. The finger was amputated. He would later conceal this in his later performances. He was trained as a pilot as an artillery observer and, at one point was labelled "the craziest pilot in the Canadian Air Force", although he wasn't officially a memeber of the RCF. Doohan' ashes will be shot into space along with 100 people, notable of them Timothy Leary, and astronaunt Gordon Cooper. But anyway I digress.
Sorry it took so long to push this post through the door, but good material is hard to come by these days.
Nathaniel