Nvidia Fermi – mis-step?

http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=3651&p=1
http://blogs.zdnet.com/hardware/?p=7824

These are just two of many articles written about Nvidia’s latest gpu platform. However when combined, (hot, expensive, power-hungry, just barely faster than AMD’s latest, coupled with a concentration on the general compute aspect of the platform) indicates to me that Nvidia may have sacrificed gaming graphics development and personal computing innovation in favor of their quest to compete with Intel etc. for CPU business.

Meanwhile AMD has lowered prices, lowered heat, lowered power requirements, all while providing cards that scream right up there with NVidia’s brand new offerings. They have finally got a good plan, and are executing on it.

And then AMD adds what is in my opinion their coup de grace, Eyefinity -http://sites.amd.com/us/underground/products/eyefinity/Pages/eyefinity.aspx . Up to now we have called dual monitors multi-monitor support, not realizing how much harder it is to go to three or more than it is to go to two monitors.. Many graphics cards, including those embedded in laptops, provided support for two monitors. However to add more required special graphics cards, external black boxes, and a hefty dose of if-you-have-to-ask-how-much-you-can’t-afford-it. AMD comes along and includes support for six monitors in their off-the-shelf card. True it’s the top of the line card, with lesser but still multi-monitor support in other cards in the line, but it’s still a shipping consumer card. This is a game-changer (pun intended) in my opinion.

Maximum Tested

Well I had been wondering where Will Smith of Maximum PC was off to when he announced he was leaving a month or so ago. I just came across his new home, and it looks like he built it himself:

http://www.tested.com/news/the-tested-manifesto/12/

He’s going to have a tough road to hoe going up against Engadget and the rest of the entrenched leaders in the crowded gadget field, but I’m glad to see him make the jump to web-only, and the requisite video reporting format. Best wishes!

We dropped the ball again – Internet TV is dead

http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/10_12/b4171038593210.htm

I was wondering why TV shows and whole channels were quickly disappearing from Hulu, why network websites were forcing me to watch shows soon after airtime as the number of episodes online dropped from all to one season to 7 to 3.

I had been waiting with glee to see Internet TV take off, reach the tipping point where online advertising provided the same amount of revenue, and then more revenue, than the cable company middlemen brought in, so that we could cut them out and hit the golden age of ala carte TV shows.

I was so frustrated when we lost the battle with the music companies, and then the movie companies. And let me be clear here about what I mean by the battle. The battle, the war, is to destroy the big media companies that have had a chokehold on what we watch and listen to for decades, and how much it costs. The internet was supposed to be the great leveler, the free shortcut that would allow content producers to save billions, passing the savings on to us, and give us back the right to choose what we like and don’t like, finally providing content producers a way to let the art get judged on it’s own merits, not on the looks of the artist or how much creative control they would sign away.

So don’t think we won either of those battles. The music and movie industries may have had some shocks, some lost business. The model may have shifted slightly. But the big 5 or so companies in charge of everything are right where they were, with all the money still flowing through their hands, and all the decisions still coming from the suits and bean counters. They bungled it for sure, fumbled the ball, but it doesn’t matter, because they picked it right back up and carried on to a touchdown.

And now we hear that the TV game is lost as well. The big cable companies have arrived at a workable model to keep control. I was hoping to see them become “dumb pipes”, just providers of internet bandwidth, with content creators free to be judged on their merits, with billions and billions of middleman cost dollars taken right out of the model such that internet advertising would more than cover the bill. But no. They fought back with bandwidth caps, hobbling Internet TV before it had a chance to fight. Network neutrality was also a gambit in this chess game. And the plan outlined in the article linked above is the KO punch, using their heavyweight muscle to force the key content channels to take their content offline and put it behind the cable paywall.

Oh I’m just sick about this.

Thanks Dwight Silverman http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/houstonchronicle/techblog/~3/s-_O3WnHeJ8/linkpost_3122010_1.html for finding this.

Microsoft Security Essentials disappears or 0x8004ff07

I looked down at my Windows 7 taskbar today to find my virus scanner absent. In fact according to the shortcut and Add/Remove Programs Microsoft Security Essentials was gone.

So I poked around in the logs some, hoping against hope I didn’t have some weird backdoor thingy that had uninstalled it for me. According to the logs it was uninstalled as part of some Windows Update hijinks. Ironically I commented just this morning that I always advised people to stay right up to date rather than trying to micromanage that stuff.

Well something went wrong with the update and MSE could not be reinstalled. I got no notice of this from Windows Update scarily enough. Once I knew that it was Microsoft removing my virusscanner I felt much better. So I downloaded a new installer and fired it up. It failed (and failed and failed).

Eventually I did a Google search on the error code, “0x8004ff07”. It looks like this is something of a common problem, and other people have had it. What wasn’t real clear was how to fix it. Somewhere, and I apologize because I’ve lost the link so I can’t credit them, I read something about removing the uninstall registry key, “[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Uninstall\Microsoft Security Essentials]”. Well though it doesn’t appear to work for everyone, that worked for me. After that I was able to reinstall MSE. Phew.

Monoprice hacked - credit cards at risk

http://www.monoprice.com
http://search.twitter.com/search?q=monoprice
http://www.facebook.com/Monopricecom

Monoprice has been a great place to get cables.

How to tell what versions of the dotnet (.net) framework are installed

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/318785

iPad availability announcement

http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2010/03/05ipad.html

“magical and revolutionary iPad”

“available in the US on Saturday, April 3, for Wi-Fi models and in late April for Wi-Fi + 3G models”

Both can be preordered from Apple’s website starting March 12th.

I saw this here - http://www.tipb.com/2010/03/05/ipad-wifi-april-3-preorders-march-12-international-late-april/

Lost Google contact and calendar data

http://www.daveswebsite.com/gsyncit_critical.shtml

Well I guess I know how I lost both my calendar and contact data now..

This is of course a very real concern, because I use synching to keep Google (the backend cloud), Outlook (my backup), and the iPhone (my user interface) all current. A problem with just one piece wipes out all three in roughly one minute. Luckily I had some backups of those folders in Outlook. And I will start making more! I guess the answer would be to get Outlook more into a backup mode than a synching mode, where I am getting a separate snapshot once a day or similar.

Kindle app/books on the iPad

http://www.techflash.com/seattle/2010/01/amazon_you_can_read_kindle_books_on_ipad_too.html

So Amazon has committed to putting Kindle books on the iPad, I assume through the iPhone app they already have available. This is great, as I have a certain amount of money invested in Kindle books. However I have to wonder about the other consent-ee in this equation, Apple. Typically they have rejected apps that duplicate built-in functionality by policy. Will they grandfather the Kindle app now that they are adding an eReader app? There is some precedence, for instance the Recorder app is still available, even though Apple added one during a major platform upgrade. Here’s hoping!

The free toolbar is on the other foot

I’m downloading an update to Java tonight when up pops a message, would I like the free Bing toolbar with that. You could have knocked me over with a feather. All those years of having the Google toolbar and Yahoo toolbar shoved down my throat (and onto my desktop or browser), and now Microsoft? And with Java no less?