Apparently Intel just announced 65nm dual core Xeons. ATI also released information about its new CrossFire platform as well. It seems like there is a battle to see can announce the most dual core information and products today.
Today AMD officially launched its dual core Athlon 64 X2. There price breakdown at quanaties of 1,000 works out that the 4200+ = $537, 4400+ = $581, 4600+ = $803 and the 4800+ = $1001. This puts the cheapest dual core above the cost of the fastest single core Athlon 64 currently listed at $482 on Price Watch for the 90 nm version. On the heels of that Intel announced today they will be producing low cost 64 bit processors in the form of there Celeron D that use there EM64T instruction set.
When I first saw that the PS3 was claimed to achieve over 400GFlops I thought the Xbox based on a similar core with an additional core (3 vs 2) would be in the 600 GFlops neighborhood. Boy was I way off. The Xbox 360 is now claimed to pull of 1 TFlops! I think microsoft should give up on windows and go towards a more platform oriented structure! Or at least code windows to support these chips!
It seems Phrack is finally done for good. They had a long hiatus a few years back as the project seemed to stall and now it is done for good. Curious that they ended maxing out a 6 bit number. (63 = 111111) There was a lot of good info to learn from there issues. “Smashing the Stack for Fun and Profit” was a good read.
While looking at
MSDN Forums I noticed they now have several different Forums that are over the 1,000 post mark. It will be interesting to see if this grows into a big community rivaling the likes of Visual Basic Forum.
Square released a Tech Demo for Final Fantasy VII recently. All I have to say is this looks like it is going to be straight evil. I always thought FF7 was one of the best in the series and I can’t wait to play it redone on the PS3.
Well I had to watch my younger brother this past weekend so I decided to go pick up a new game for us to play while he was over. After a quick look over what had recently been released and a phone call from a buddy telling me about it I quickly decided to pick up a copy of Forza Motorsports. This is one of the Gran Turismo series biggest competitors in my opinion. The vehicle physics are excellent, the graphics - astounding, and the car sounds seem less generalized than those in GT4. Along with the great gameplay there are several other things that I think set this game apart from GT4. While viewing replays you can get all sorts of data from the game about your drive. Default information is HP, Torque, Speed, Boost, Gear and RPM however you mountains more information such as the amount of stress on the tires, suspension travel, tire temperature, and so on. The Drivatar system is a great alternative to the GT4 b-spec driver which can be quite stupid on many occasions. In order to use a Drivatar you must first train it with your driving style. The better you can drive the better the Drivatar will do. There is also an engine swap option for some of the cars, such as my 1973 Porsche 911 with a modern 911 GT2 motor in it making near 800hp. The only down side is that there are very noticable bugs that occur. When the game is loading the next track it shows whatever the car you were in for the last race not the current race. For example, say you were driving a Corvette last race and now you are going to go tune your Audi for the AWD series when going to the Test track it would say loading Corvette C6 instead of the Audi which it was actually loading. Another big hole is the pretty much infinite money that can be made buying and selling engines for cars that can do motor swaps. Buy a VW Jetta, max out its engine than buy a custom engine. The new engine is discounted to 2,500CR when you buy it but if you sell it you recieve nearly 25,000CR for it. Clearly something was overlooked as this makes earning money from racing pointless. Regardless of these minor bugs what is really important is whether or not the game is fun to play and interesting enough to hold your attention which I must say Forza has been doing both of these, so far, as well as any GT series game.
I have created a new site to offer anyone on the internet the service of keeping track of passwords. I will probably release the code or even allow anonymous FTP access so people can view the code to make sure there is no shadiness going on behind the scenes. I am using what I consider an irreversible way to store encrypted data in a database without the users interaction. Visit the link on the left labeled pwsave to learn more about it and give it a test drive. I think it is a great tool to save passwords to things you use somewhat frequently such as web forums or blogs.
I just started on a gallery of wedding pictures I took with my new 5 megapixel camera on 5MP mode standard quality (not the higher 5MP mode which yeilds pictures 3-4x the size!). These pictures can be used as desktop wall papers easily. I use two LCDs in 1280×1024 and they more than span the dimension required to fill both screen with the wall paper with out any strectching. I just recomend centering it across both monitors. I am presently using the bird I shot in flight in the everglades. Have fun browsing the pictures!
It seems our friend google is messing around with updates again. I have seen pagerank and backlink counts from months previous and new values as well as the current values floating around.