Let me start this off with MS gave me Vista x64 ulti for free. Yep. One of the many conferences I attended I would guess. It's not the first time they gave me Vista free. I have a biz edition free as well. I had more but I gave them away. I intended to stay with XP for a very long time. I have a lot of free MS stuff thats just sitting there.

So going into it, I'm happy I dont have to spend $75-$150 for Vista. Let me tell you, I am VERY happy I haven't spent any money on this. I don't think I could stay sane if I had.

So lets put it this way. I quit. I'm done. MS it's over. It's not me, it's you. Really. I tried to change for you but I just can do it anymore.

I've found someone new. Ubuntu is new, it's exciting. I think this could be something really special. It's going to take some time but I think maybe we were made for each other.

It'll take some time, and sadly, I have to keep you around for a while, if only for the kids. (Do you even remember them? Fallout, Fear, Bioshock, Crysis?) You don't even pay attention to them anymore. It's just so much work to get you to spend a little time with them. You used to care about it. It used to mean something to you, what happened?

It's like you just stopped caring. You got so wrapped up with being you that you didn't care about anyone anymore.

I don't know what I'll do with the kids. I'll find a way to get by. I did great before you came along and I suspect I'll do even better once I get used to you being gone.

Okay, so you go through life, and you make mistakes. Some mistakes are small, others are larger. If you're lucky, your worst mistake ever doesn't effect anyone else. If you're not.... people get hurt.

My worst mistake ever just happened.

I went to Captain John's Crab House (and Seafood Buffet) in Virginia Beach. Let me start off by saying that three miles away and for two dollars more there is a much better seafood buffet called Captain George's. I had not been to Captain Johns in years, 15 or so. Back then they had lobster on the buffet. It was at least time for a review.

But it's not the same place at the least they've moved. It's likely not the same owners, if it is, something has gone very wrong.

Clue #1: The plates they served the snow crab on come from a different restaurant (Boston Lobster House). As I ate my meal, I longed to be at the Boston Lobster House, or anywhere else for that matter. (Oh to be back in math ****learning how to do fractions for the first time while having a long painful dental process done by an intern on their first day. A far, far better place.)

Clue #2: The "hair" found in the macaronni and cheese. We'll to be fair, there was no real cheese in the macaronni. It was pretty much just wet noodles. The hair was of a type that Clarence Thomas might note.

Clue #3: The Urinal doesn't flush in the men's room. It's a minor thing, having toilets that flush. But when you want that transient bus station ambieance, well...

To be fair, the crab was really good. The she-crab soup was good. Everything else was... well.... lets just say my daughter was very happy that they didn't do anything to the pudding. It's sad when you mess up pudding as it comes from a can as is. Thankfully they left it as is and it's likely one of the best things on the menu.

So you're thinking, "Ha! Seafood Buffet! You should know better than to order a buffer when you can get it fresh." Normally I'd agree with you, but this place was known for their buffet. It used to be good, it should STILL be good.

It's not.

Just say no, spend the extra $2 and go few miles up Laskin road to Captain Georges. Let Capt. John go down with the ship. It's a far better fate.

Clue #4: I took my daughter to McDonald's afterwards so should could get a nice meal. Sad.

Once again, I'm in the inq.. On the letters page today. 

 

I -really- need to post some build pics soon.

 

UPDATE:

On the inq again....

http://www.theinquirer.net/default.aspx?article=40095

 

AND I think I'll be in Information week soon, and.... I think I got mentioned on the radio last week, but I missed when they would have done it, so... no count there.... 

 

Ahhh dumb fun. I got quoted on the inquirer. Want to find it? Its within 48 hours of this date.

See, I have this odd hobby. I like getting my name said on the radio or put in print. If you listened to 'my' station here, you'd here my name about once a month. If you read the same magazines as I do, you'd see my name about three times a year.

Now I've added websites. Note, it can't be just a simple comment form, it's got to be in the article to count.

C'mon, like that's the weirdest hobby you've ever heard of!

These are some random thoughts I had over the weekend, finally took a minute to write a few of them down.

AMD Barcelona may be in production right now or should be in the next 30 days. If you figure the turn around time on chips AMD needs to be in production to have chips for delivery in June/July. However, AMD could announce that they are ready to take orders in June/July in which case they could delay slightly. However, juding by pent up demand (yours truely delaying several server and desktop purchases for the release of these new chips) it's very possible that they are building some inventory volume right now in order to meet demand.

So why isn't AMD talking about it? They've got a lot of old tech they are still trying to EOL (end of life) not just because their is less demand for it, but also because AMD is capacity contrained, so by removing chips that are less profitable and or less desirable to the market they free up production for the more desirable chips. Of course special requests (Dell's elcheapo lines) will keep some of those less desirable processors in market and in production.


AMD 4x4 Chipset. AMD will build one sooner or later. First, the whole AMD / Nvidia question was to have an across the board chip set like Centrinio or Viiv (rhymes with dive). With 4x4 being it's workstation c.l.a.s.s. (you cant say that word otherwise.. silly gamespot!!) product, it makes sense to have its chipset there. But it also makes sense to make it's chipset better. If you look at the design on the 4x4, one processor has to loop through the memory controller of the other in order to get to the outside world. Thats not terrible, but it does add latency and some potential perhipheral contention. Whats the solution? Take the chip set and give it a crossbar design from the native quad core chips.

This would allow the chipset to talk to both sockets directly without the current loop through. Further if you want to get really annoying. You can have processor to secondary chip set directly talk as well. This would allow socket 1 to talk to pcie16-A and socket2 to talk2 pcie16-B directly without having to share bus space. Granted with HT3.0 it's less of an issues, but the latency that builds up is always a concern.

Now add to that AMD's 'alien processor' slot. It lets a third party processor drop into an AMD motherboard. Fusion would be a good first candidate but it's going to need a lot of bandwidth to talk to the outside world, it's one more reason to have direct connectivity to the chipsets and processors.


Microsoft is a thorn to PC game developers. Right now, the bulk of the PC gamer community runs on DX9. DX10 is way better but there's not a lot of hardware for it in the market place. So DX9 rules. Game developers have to think about three targets now when writing software. DX9 on XP, DX9 on Vista, and DX10 on Vista. It's more work and it makes developing and supporting the PC more expensive. Add in that nVidia and ATi would both love it if XP could run DX10 and you have a mess.

MS will feel pressure to get DX10 on XP from the hardware vendors. Game developers would LOVE to only deal with DX10 and DX9 on XP and offer some token support to Vista until it actually has some market presence. Will MS backpeddle and release Xp-DX10? Maybe. Vista's adoption or lack there of will drive that.


AMD limited edition 45nm server chips? AMD unlike intel isn't in the race by itself. It has tech partnerships with others as well as outside fabs. Some of those outside Fabs are running at 45nm for some production. Depending on your view of AMD it's either just now getting into 45nm pre-production or it already had the ball rolling while 65nm was still in pre-production. If they're in production now, and the general transition time is one year for the first yeild-ready parts then we might see the first chips hitting in the Oct-Dec range. If they're just getting everything rolling now, then we're looking at a March-July range in 2008. AMD doesn't need 45nm to compete yet. It's 90nm parts were for the most part power/performance equal to most of intel's 65nm line. The new revision processors will likely play a similar game with intel's first 45nm line. AMD wants to win clearly in the power / performance race, so a push for 45nm tech makes sense.


Keep watching.