Day: September 29, 2003

CNet reports that Sun announced heavy losses today.  In a seperate report, CNN Tech reports that Sun is ready to announce a new breed of processors that could be up to 100 times faster than current chips.  The article is not technical, but promises major improvements of semiconductor to chip and chip to chip communications.

Sun might be able to recoup some money by renting out their IP:

Sun already holds seven patents on the new design and will seek to capitalize on them commercially, a Sun spokesman said.

If they take the IP rental route, they won’t even have to manufacture chips in order to make money.  They could definately use a fincancial breakthrough, and this might be it.

Mobiletracker confirms rumors from Mobile Burn (as much as said rumors can be confirmed).  The Nokia 3660 is possibly on its way, replacing the 3650.  There will also be a gimpy version for the US called the 3620.

The only obvious difference is the still funky yet closer to normal keypad.

Users can only hope for MIDP 2.0 and sockets that work.  I’ll be crossing my fingers.

Alan Green has to watch what he downloads each month.  Luckily he has a couple of gigs left over at the end of this month so he can download a few extra things.  I downloaded The Fanimatrix without a second thought this morning (using BitTorrent of course).  It’s not uncommon for me to download the latest release of a bootable Linux distro and not checking it out until the next release is out.  Of course I can’t use the old version, I’ve got to download the new ISO!

In the land where SUVs rule, we take unlimited banwidth over broadband for granted.  How much longer is it going to last?

Last night I ordered a new laptop from HP.  Erik was hoping that I’d pick up the widescreen eMachines M5312, but after playing with it in the store, something just didn’t feel right about it to me.

I picked up the HP ze4430us, which is toward the higher end of HP’s ‘just around $1000’ range of notebooks.  It has a Mobile Athlon XP 2400+ (1.8GHz) processor with 512k of cache (Barton, baby!).  I’m an AMD guy at heart (though I’ve got a good bit of Intel gear), so I went for the Mobile Athlon over the Celeron 2GHz that seemed to be in most of the laptops in my price range.

It’s really amazing how much laptop you can get for just over a grand nowadays.

Rounding out the specs, it’s got a non-widescreen 15 inch display, 512 megs of RAM (2×256 of course), an ATI Mobility chipset with 64 megs of shares memory, a 40 gig drive (perfect for running multiple operating systems) and built-in 802.11g (Broadcomm chip) with a little button to turn it on and off.  It’s only got one PCMCIA/Cardbus slot, but it seems like that’s the way budget notebooks are heading.  It’s got the usual required USB ports (for my bluetooth dongle!) as well as a firewire port, along with various other connections.

I have not found any showstoppers about this model yet, though in an ideal world my laptop would have built in Bluetooth.  Until Broadcomm 802.11g support is added to Linux, I’m going to have to use a PCMCIA card for Wi-Fi under Linux.  Wide screens are the new geek chic, but besides the eMachines laptop, most of the widescreens cost at least a little bit more.

From a quick search, it looks like at least SuSE will run on this particular model, and once the laptop arrives (hopefully Wednesday) I’ll see which distros will take.