Sometime before April a project will go forward to build a complete house using just two materials and robots. Can't wait to see this in mass production.

AMD has been slowly ramping up a drumbeat about their plans for the future of the CPUs. With their recent acquisition of ATI they have a key component for their idea of modular processors. Ars Technica has a good post explaining in depth the multifaceted plan for customizable solutions.

Intel on the other hand seems to be sticking with their general purpose processors by pushing more and more cores and good performance per watt numbers.

I didn't think it was going to happen but AMD and ATI are merging. The skinny can be found here, here, here, and um here. I have to wonder if this was planned before or after the Core 2 Duo. It seems likely before but it could be a panic reaction.

What makes a Mac, a Mac? It's the user experience. I keep hearing that the a Mac is all about OS X. While this may be true of the exact moment, what Apple really is about is the user's experience. It's about the elegance, the look, the feel, the service, the tangibility that says this product not only feels better than any Wintel or Lintel box running around out there it IS better. Sure Apple and their Macs are a niche market, despite the iPod, but that's a good thing. I believe any move that makes them anything but is a disaster to both the company and the consumer. In the end becoming just another computer company churning out computers, though making a few bucks, won't put your name in the history books and certainly won't create the loyal following like Apple has today. There is always a need for that white sheep in a sea of black sheep to remind us that while cheep is all well and good, when you want something better here it is. I must add that though I have used a Mac and used OS 9 and OS X at work, I have never owned a Mac.

So I had a discussion with my friends today over coffee about third world countries versus first world countries. We talked about supposed utopia and complete equality. I don't believe that people are necessarily born equal in every way. Not physically, mentally, nor really should they be treated as such. However, there are a few things things people should be treated equal about. First everyone should be able to have the same medical care, everyone should have the same opportunity for education (whether everyone goes to AP classes or not is another matter), everyone should be protected equally under the law. We have some things right, not everything. I think that a society without competition, without adversity, is a stagnant society. One which will inherently fail because a society that has nothing to strive for doesn't strive for anything. How do we connect the one argument with the other? Well, perhaps I dunno. Life does what it does, let's keep it going and maybe get the answers we seek.

In case you hadn't noticed already I'm voting for Kerry this election, but regardless of who I may want to win, if you aren't voting at all this year you suck. Who's up for some old school MLP? I knew you were.

It seems AMD has been doing very well this year, seemingly beating Intel to the punch with their latest Athlon 64 4000+. One wonders what AMD will use to base their model numbers with as Intel starts focusing more on general preformance rather than GHZ. Apple also has been doing good lately. They released new iBooks and re-added their single G5 desktop today. One of these days, maybe when their next generation comes out, I need to get me an iPod. My favorate maven of the late night comedy fake news The Daily Show, John Stewart has been having an interesting month showing up at CNN's Crossfire calling one of the hosts a dick, talking to Bill O'Reilly on his show, and releasing a book which has now been banned at Walmart. If anyone doesn't know anything about Google these days they need to go Google it. Anyway they released a new Desktop Search program that can combine web searching with searching files on your hard drive. However some people have voiced concerns about it. I myself am not sure I want anything on my system that can search through some of my encrypted files as if they werent. One of my newest favorate authors Neal Stephenson was interviewed at Slashdot.

Wasn't that fun? I'm going to sleep.

One last bit about George W. Bush. Alright, so maybe I'm a little harsh to Bush. I don't hate him, like many other anti-bush people, but then again there's nothing that I like about him either. Bush and his administration have divided this country literally in half; alienated the black community, done nothing but hurt civil rights, health care, social security, and diluted the separation of church and state. I wouldn't use Fahrenheit 911 as propaganda against him though. I will be rooting for John Kerry and John Edwards this November. That is of course if Homeland Security don't manage to delay the elections.

I've been reading The Age of Spiritual Machines by Ray Kurzweil. It's a very interesting read. He has some interesting theories about Order and Chaos, The law of Increasing Returns, and evolutions next step into the age of machines. It's a definite read if your interested in what might happen in the 21st century.

I almost forgot, last weekend I got the parts I ordered for my new computer. AMD xp 2000+, ASUS A7N8X-X motherboard, 512mb, 1 40g drive, 2 120g drives, ATI Radeon 9200 SE, and a SuperFlower 401 black case. It's replacing my primary computer.

Read some interesting pages about Microsoft over the last week or two. The most telling was How Microsoft Lost the API War which has a theory about the change internally from backwards compatibility. There is some more evidence that this change has become quite pervasive here and here. As someone who believes heartily that backwards compatibility is key to having a large enough software base for good adoption this trend is most telling that Microsoft is going in the wrong direction. Lawrence Lessig posted on his blog an interesting speech Cory Doctorow gave to some people at Microsoft about DRM. Finally, if its to be believed, Transgaming has announced WineX 4.0, named Cedega, which will be able to run Windows games on Linux with very good compatibility and performance.

As a semi peruser of all things I found this interesting stuff about airships and of course the Zeppelin. I was prompted to look at this because the Zeppelin Flies Again.I found this article on blogs from Time to be interesting. Of special note was this paragraph:

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"We may be in the golden age of blogging, a quirky Camelot moment in Internet history when some guy in his underwear with too much free time can take down a Washington politician. It will be interesting to see what role blogs play in the upcoming election. Blogs can be a great way of communicating, but they can keep people apart too. If I read only those of my choice, precisely tuned to my political biases and you read only yours, we could end up a nation of political solipsists, vacuum sealed in our private feedback loops, never exposed to new arguments, never having to listen to a single word we disagree with."

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Those of you that visit slashdot often may have already seen this stuff and find it redundant, but I don't really care, so thbbbt!

Yeah um so in keeping with my general disregard for updating the web site in anything close to a timely manner... I'm all moved in and classes are over, wahoo. It's gonna be a fun filled summer. Got alot of projects I want to get going, gonna be taking calc II also over the summer, and maybe ill have time to go visit my friend Dan in Nevada. Just wanting to let you'se know that I _am_ still working on the material for the site. Click here and um here and also here for fun and information about the end of the world, the next generation in batteries, and SCO. Cause I said so.

I havn't been keeping the HOSTS file up to date cause when it loads it eats a significant amount of resources and seems to take a long time to load. Some of my friends have been complaining about sluggish machines when they have it loaded as well. One of my friend suggested it would be cool if there was a web site devoted to managing the HOSTS file, allowing people to add and remove sites. The site could make sure there are no duplicates and could run through the list every week or month to see if any of the sites in the HOSTS file no longer exist so it can remove them. I just might do that. If you don't know what a HOSTS file is go here.