Day: June 27, 2003

Erik out-blogged me about this already, but I’ve set up a Wiki page for the software that I have installed on my new Nokia 3650.  It includes everything that I currently have installed on the phone (though I’ve got a lot more installing to go) as well as a wish list of software I’m looking at as well as a place to suggest stuff for me to check out.

CNet reports that AMD is trying to reduce costs of manufacturing in some interesting ways:

In the Athlon64 line, for instance, the 3700+, 3400+ and 3100+ chips will initially come with 1MB of cache. In the fourth quarter, however, the underlying structure of the 3100+ will change: Its clock speed will substantially increase, but its cache will be reduced to 256KB, or one-quarter the original size.

Also:

AMD’s plans for the Thorton chip, an upcoming member of the Athlon XP family, suggest it will be the same size as the Barton chip, but half of the cache on the processor will be disabled. (It will also be paired with a slower bus

I understand that given the current economic outlook, you’ve got to cut costs by any means neccesary, but I’m not too thrilled by how they appear to be doing so.  I know back in the early Thunderbird days it was easier to make a faster chip in a smaller process and then clock it down.  That’s fine, but reducing the cache so significantly without making note of it to the end consumer is not, IMHO.

I’d rather have a slightly slower chip with a 1MB cache than a higher speed chip with less cache.  It’s why Celerons (especially older ones) can lag out sometimes.  Granted, the newer Celerons and Durons are much better than in the past, but if you’re going to cripple a chip, put a sticker on it or something.

Minirant aside, I’m still totally stoked about the Opteron and the Athlon64, and I’d like to have one on my desk as soon as it’s reasonably affordable.  For the record I run a mix of AMD and Intel chips among my computers, some by choice (My oldschool Athlon 750) and others by virtue of extremely good deals that I couldn’t pass up (Dual PIII733’s and a PIII850).  The Celerons, PII’s and K6-II’s that I still run are mostly Linux/BSD machines, and they don’t complain one bit.

Matt Raible:

Thanks to Karl for tipping me off that JDK 1.4.2 has been released. [Download, Release Notes]

Calvin Austin at java.sun.com:

By the end of 2003, Java developers will be able to get their hands on a beta version of Java 2 Platform, Standard Edition 1.5 (J2SE 1.5). This release and the current 1.4 updates, 1.4.1 and 1.4.2, were covered in the J2SE roadmap session at the 2003 JavaOne Conference. If you were unable to attend the session, or want to refresh your memory, here are the key points from the talk.

I’m glad to see that they’re still working on bugfixes for the 1.4.x branch while pushing ahead with the 1.5 beta.  Look for the major changes in 1.5 though.

Jon Udell has great coverage of Echo.  With Dave Winer’s endorsement, it looks like all of the major blog vendors will be supporting this new format once it stabalizes.  It’ll happen sooner than you think too.

I’m passively watching the whole thing, confident that it will work out. 

This Infosync article notes that T-Mobile also has a $19.95/mo unlimited GPRS plan.  I’m going to stick with my initial 10MB/mo for $9.95/mo until I see exactly how much I use.  I’m pretty sure that each additional meg after that is only an additional dollar, so if I go over a little bit, it’s (hopefully) not a big deal.

Another question is what is T-Mobile’s definition of Unlimited?  Lets hope it’s not similar to the definition of Unmetered in Ireland.

I didn’t notice it yesterday, but Mono 0.25 has been released.  Thanks to OSNews for the link.  The release notes sport tons of additions and improvements all around.