Sayan’s BlogWorld

Inquirer has this interesting story (and proof) that Dell is misrepresenting performance figures of the AMD Opteron vs. Intel Xeon. The article also mentions that Dell wants the Inquirer to pull this story off its website !! When will Dell and Intel wake up and face the truth- instead of fudging numbers and instilling FUD (Fear, Uncertainity, Doubt for the uninitiated) into consumers’ minds they better go and actually start making better products.

The New York Times contributor-sponsored ad for the Mozilla Firefox 1.0 browser has just come out.

Something interesting may be cooking between IBM and AMD. IBM selling off its PC business may open the doors to its aquiring AMD. They certainly complement each other.

IBM has realized that the processors for game consoles are a bigger market than processors for computers. The economies of scale from selling to game consoles can also help pricing for the PC market. After selling PC business to Lenovo - it is not tied to Intel (and its marketing money). It would gain access to more production centres and a real good engineering / R&D team with a bunch of AMD IP (also the x86 cross-licensed IP). IBM would also get the nice low-powered Geode (AMD acquired from National Semicondutor a few years ago).

AMD would get to stand on the shoulders of a giant. Its innovative products are gaining traction in the market but needs more investment and production facilities not to mention the lucrative game console market (It lost out to Intel on the Microsoft Xbox). One of the reasons Dell cites for not selling AMD-based PCs is that AMD can’t produce enough to satisfy Dell’s giant hunger.

Feel free to drop in your comments/thoughts about this at c.sayan at gmail dot com

I felt a tinge of sadness as a ex-IBMer that IBM was selling its PC business to Lenovo that too for a cheap $1.7 billion. This article tries to look beyond the figures of the sale and read the minds of the dealmakers.

What is Google Suggest? Quoting Googles’ blurb:
As you type into the search box, Google Suggest guesses what you’re typing and offers suggestions in real time. This is similar to Google’s “Did you mean?” feature that offers alternative spellings for your query after you search, except that it works in real time. For example, if you type “bass,” Google Suggest might offer a list of refinements that include “bass fishing” or “bass guitar.”…

Is this how the internet and our online society be 10 years from now? Will this kind of online society be good or bad or something in between?
Thanks to Atif for forwarding this interesting attempt at fortune-telling

To all those who grew up watching Star Trek and still can’t get enough of it. The pictures from the Cassini-Huygens mission are stunning but the use of Star Trek lingo- Captain’s Log is interesting. Gene Roddenberry sure would have appreciated it.

Right now hearing a presentation on Osprey by its developers at ibiblio. It looks like it would be the next generation content distribution system- somewhat like BitTorrent on steroids.

Right now attending a presentation by ibiblio on Lyceum - an open source blogging tool / application. ibiblio is hosted by my department at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.