Recent Comments:
NVIDIA continues to hate on Intel, promises sub-$45 integrated chipset {Engadget}
Apr 26th 2008 12:44AM Just went to Frys, where intel charges $1500 for their 500 million transistor chip on a 45nm process. Compare that to $600 for a 1billion transistor chip on a process that has a lower yield, plus the pc board, the memory, the packaging, and the manufacturing. Who's the bigger scrooge?
Fujitsu's MHZ2 CJ series drives take crypto seriously {Engadget}
Apr 24th 2008 4:12AM Yeah I want to see them freeze, then unsolder the bga chips off the pcb and cold resolder them onto another to read their contents without heating it back up.
Eee PC 900 gets dissected, looks about the same as the Eee PC 700 {Engadget}
Apr 20th 2008 8:12PM Well, the life-form actually lives inside the Intel chip package, they're natural habitat is much warmer than ours, so the packaging is heated to a good 60-70c before they come out of "hibernation".
FireWire: over a billion ports served {Engadget}
Apr 9th 2008 11:22PM I think USB has the Bandwidth, since DV is about 30mbps (straight DV, not one of the higher bandwidth versions). The problem with USB though is that it doesn't have the arbitration and control protocols (at least initially, don't know about now) to ensure that your FW device can continue to stream at speed since it's physically coming off a tape spinning at a certain speed, so it doesn't appreciate interruptions. USB devices don't do such a great job so lets say you needed to transfer some files from a USB drive attached to the same root hub, it can cause an interruption from other devices on the chain. Not an issue if you have enough overhead and some buffering, but that's why they throw 480mbps at you, to minimize the impact of these interruptions. That works as long as you have lots of overhead, but once you start transferring large amounts of data, it degrades quickly. If you transferred from say a USB camcorder to a USB hdd, it passes all the way to the computer, and back out to the HDD. Firewire on the other hand can actually transfer from a Firewire camcorder to another Firewire VCR or HDD attached to the same cable directly without passing through the PC since it has multiple "Masters" meaning the Camcorder can talk directly to the VCR. It's really quite elegant compared to USB which like it's name, was meant to be a really fast shared Serial port.
FireWire: over a billion ports served {Engadget}
Apr 9th 2008 10:22PM I love firewire, I have various Firewire DVD-RW drives which I use, I can plug them into any of my PCs and notebooks. Very important on notebooks since they don't have that many USB ports, and lower CPU utilization over firewire. I also use a Sony VGP-XL1B firewire changer, 200 disk DVD-RW changer, that doesn't work over USB. You can daisy chain. I can gather all my firewire drives together and simultaneously burn to all of them.. all from a single firewire connector on my notebook. I have a couple firewire HDD enclosures. Again, performance is better than over USB2.0. Finally, one of the best features is whenever I install XP on a machine, the first thing I do is network it over Firewire to a notebook bridged between firewire and Ethernet. I can then download all the appropriate drivers to get the video and network card running without all the hassle of burning it on a CD or flash drive, etc. On a Mac, I can mount a the Mac like an external HDD over firewire. If only there had been no firewire licensing fee from the beginning, it would have kicked USB all over the place just because of daisy chaining, and shared performance over a single link.
Sony looking to stuff Blu-ray recorders in select LCD HDTVs? {Engadget}
Apr 7th 2008 4:24PM Meh you guys are not looking at the target consumer, who is already receiving complaints that a non-flat TV detracts from the decor. Now, the wife finally agrees to a flat screen because it doesn't stand out or occupy cabinet space / require special furniture, and now you're going to have to hook up an external BD recorder with an hdmi cable, and a flat 1' deep surface to put it on? These people don't care about the serviceability or the inability to ship one part to be repaired, repairs never even enter the equation. Watching media from a HDD? Not in the equation, they want to borrow a disk from a friend and put it in, they don't spend the time to download media, or install AnyDVDHD to rip a disk, they simply get them from Netflix or off the shelf at Target. They don't spend time reading Engadget or caring about anything besides their kids, house payments, and their sports teams. Watching a movie or recording a TV show is just commodity tech, and if it can be don e elegantly, they prefer it.
Windows 7 to arrive next year, says Bill Gates {Engadget}
Apr 4th 2008 7:16PM That and the 2000-XP switch. XP came out around 2001, since I guess 2000 didn't sell that well. But what did XP have over 2000 for the first couple years? More glitzy desktop, and um.. that's about it. XP used more memory, and didn't bring that much to the table over 2000. Lots of people bitched about XP since it used more ram than 98 and 2000 without any substantial benefits. Same thing with 98, it really didn't add anything to 95, you could still run all the same software, though 98SE dealt with the large HDD problem a year or two later.
I have a feeling that Windows 7 will do the same thing, address the issues that users thought make Vista uninteresting as a self-upgrade. By then, all the hardware sold for the last 3 years will be at least compatible from a driverbase, hopefully all the x64 driver issues will be ironed out (I still can't use Palm Desktop to pull up my old contacts), and the average system will ship with 4GB because ram's so cheap now. Then all the features that were skipped in Vista will have a chance to be completed, and people will get not bitch as much when they get Windows 7 preinstalled. By then, the critical issues with Vista will be mostly fixed, and businesses will start buying Vista preinstalled (or downgrading) while giving Win7 the wary-eye. Then Windows 8 will come out after a long delay (with tons of newness, a new audio/graphic layer that breaks all old hardware APIs, DX11 will switch to raytrace/voxels which won't run in Win7, and everyone points and laughs at the new winlogon replacement that uses videocams and voice recognition), and the bitching will begin all over again until Win9.
Buffalo's DriveStation Combo4 external HDD touts four interfaces {Engadget}
Apr 3rd 2008 3:37PM Mainly so you can daisy chain the drives, not to plug into two computers. You daisy chain firewire devices so you don't have to buy those pesky hubs like with USB.
Intel rep says people "probably won't" need discrete graphics in the future {Engadget}
Apr 3rd 2008 2:30PM Somehow, that comment shows that you don't play fast paced FPS often, or know anyone who does. I think the human limit is different between pulling people off the street and testing them, versus people who game regularly. People train their senses and skills, just like if you tested how fast people can pull off streetfighter uppercuts by sampling 1000 random participants in Tibet, or sampling hearing sensitivity in the blind, you're going to end up with wildly inaccurate results. People who have tried it can see a difference running >60fps. It may not necessarily be the eye's ability to see all the frames, it may just be that the eye's motion vector sensing capabilities work better with high frame rates, but it's definitely more comfortable staring at a game running 120hz, than 60 or 30hz (if there are no dropped frames). Sudden dropouts in frame rate are very noticeable. 45 hz doesn't even work well, since most software tries to lock at 30 or 60 fps, while LCDs typically lock at 60.
Linux becomes only OS to escape PWN 2 OWN unscathed {Engadget}
Mar 29th 2008 8:11PM Re: Andir, That's a pretty ridiculous statement based on very little information. Unless the same programming team worked on both Windows and Linux versions of Flash, it's an apples to oranges comparison. Even if they did, it could be simply a coding bug, it's not like they just take the exact same code, compile it in all three platforms and it just works. Even the versions may be different, it may be a bug specific to the current version of Flash installed on that Vista system that may or may not have affected earlier versions (and knowing Adobe, the minor versions of Flash on Mac and Linux probably trail behind Windows due to the size of the relative size of programming teams). Even looking at linux based home routers, bugs are present in some brands and not in others even they use the same codebase. You can't make sweeping generalizations of this nature without any of the details which are still under NDA.
