5/17/2008
TechCrunch scooped a story about ArsTechnica being purchased by media outlet Conde Naste. If you are interested in the nuts and bolts of technology I highly recommend Ars and hope it continues to progress under CN stewardship.
Beginning in the spring of 1998 I was involved with a pilot Cisco networking program at my high school. And with a bit of spare time on my hand I began reading several geek web publications during class time. This included the then-new Slashdot, ArsTechnica, News.com and the now defunct Aces Hardware.
I credit the combination of all four of these as having the most influence on my geek upbringing and cite them as the main reason I decided not to study IT in college — why pay for old news from a ancien professor when you can read all of the latest and greatest for free each day at home?
And because you’re sitting at the edge of your seat, for the record: I didn’t care much for either AnandTech or TomsHardware as the years went by. Anand had to always talk about the latest AP test he took and Tom seemed shady with his metrics. Conversely, too bad JC News disappeared, John always had interesting insights (see his old pages at the Internet Archive).
Anyways, I think my favorite contributor at Ars is Jon Stokes as he single handidly taught me everything about the last three generations of CPUs, GPUs and bus interconnects.
In addition Ars has some other neat RSS feeds for the science buff (Nobel Intent) and gamer (Opposable Thumbs). And I’m hoping their new Storage/Datacenter/Networking channel will feed my HPC-loving mind.
At the same time I’d like to tip my hat to Paul DeMone, Johan De Galas, Brian Neal and others over at the extinct AcesHardware. If for no other reason than they got me to appreciate the DEC Alpha, CISC/RISC wars, and pipeline stages. Remember, not every stage is created equal. In fact, for shits and giggles check out old pages of Aces over at the Internet Archive.
If you’re interested, RealWorldTech and TechReport have picked up where Aces left off. And the Chip Architect has good stuff too when he decides to post something once every other year.
See also:
A Belated Farewell to the DEC Alpha
What a difference 36 years make
So, you want to make a computer chip
What do Botnets and GPGPUs have in common?
GPU versatility
Seth Lloyd’s Million Megahertz CPU
What is wrong with Moore’s Law?
Specialization, Centralization, and the Future of Chip Integration
Intel Has a Small Urethra
This is a huge survey from the makers of the Half-Life series.
Things that stand out to me:
- Nearly 60% of users still only have a single core system
- More than 40% of users are ultra low-ping bastards (LPBs) with 2 mb/s bandwidth
- Roughly 15% of the users have migrated to Vista which is still significantly higher than adoption rates by enterprises
- About 100,000 users install and play the games with the Russian language pack
- The number 308,754. That is the amount of users with HyperThreading enabled in their processors. It is a cool parallelization technology that has not been included on any Intel chip for more than 2 years and was solely relegated to the upper echelon’s of P4 cores. Fortunately for the consumer, it’ll be back out with Nehalem later this year.
It would be nice to see ascending versus descending annotations. For instance, I’m sure that as the months go by, the user base continues to move towards multi-core systems and multi-megabit connections.
If you look under Video Card Descriptions nearly 20% is listed as Other. I would wager that the long tail prevented the reporting of the largest segment, ATI-based cards in the 2×00 and 3×00 series.
I personally find it amazing that anyone would want to try and play the games produced by Valve on something like a GeForce MX or VIA-based IGP. These users are the same people who probably enjoy trying to finish the Friday edition of the NYT crossword puzzle by themselves.
And the weirdest series of spikes are at the very bottom with hard drive size. Were 96 GB drives that popular? I wonder how many of these people try to play on laptops.
Oh, and this really puts the magical 384 number I learned in stat class to shame (to wit, to generalize the purchasing habits of 1,000,000 people you only need to randomly select and survey 384 people).
So I’ve decided if I ever buy a new laptop I definitely have to make sure the motherboard uses a BIOS from Phoenix with HyperSpace or is part of the Splashtop lineup from ASUS.
Here is hands-on review of SplashTop.
Seriously neat, especially considering the fact that I’m pretty much a cloud user. In fact, I think Azureus is about the only desktop app I use anymore.
The insta-on feature will probably be even cooler when the Centrino 2 (Montevina) platform is released in June. Check out it’s nifty NAND features.
I suppose it won’t be too useful to hardcore gamers or those that have to use productivity suites, but it really takes the headache out of migrating from XP to Vista for IT departments.
About the only downside I can see from the average user is logging/saving information. Based on the information from press releases and previews apparently both HyperSpace and SplashTop allow users to access various forms of media (including the hard drive). I tend to keep many tabs open while I’m browsing and manually kill the browser to prevent losing the tabs (thus creating a restore session). I wonder if either virtual machine running underneath HS or ST will save these somehow or if it starts a new browser by default (probably the latter for security reasons). And what about IM logging? I don’t use that feature much anymore (switched to Meebo online) but it’s still nice to have — and it is Google Chat’s only redeeming feature.
Note: the International Semiconductor Association paid me $2 million to write this post.
