VIA & Home Theater

VIA, the maker of lower end motherboard chipsets, as been making small motherboards of themselves. Their purpose is a very simple one, so the information flow isn't as high as in desktop systems. Their motherboards are meant specifically for a home theater system. When you look at the cost of these small motherboards and what they can do, it's really a small price to pay for the convenience of a home theater system that is able to run a windows operating system.

Will you create a home theater system for yourself?

AMD Concludes Plus Rating

Ever since the Athlon XP processors were released AMD has been using the plus rating or PR system to model their chips. Since Intel and AMD measure their clock frequencies differently the PR system brought those frequencies into perspective and showed AMD winning over Intel. This led AMD through the Athlon 64 era against the Pentium 4 series. Now that dual-core and quad-core processors have come to the forefront the PR system is no longer necessary and doesn't make sense anyway. A new modeling system will be devised in the coming months of the year 2007.

How do you think the new modeling system will turn out?

Intel Bloomfield

While the bloomfield is still a little over a year away the plans already exist for it. It seems to me like an AMD killer. It's a quad-core, runs at over four gigahertz per core, allows for multiple multi-threading, has an on-chip memory controller, and a cumulative eight megabytes of L2 cache. While the cache isn't unexpected, the memory controller is. After all these years, the memory controller has given AMD a leg-up on Intel in memory performance. It looks like they'll be equals at the beginning of 2008.

Will AMD be able to counter Intel's new lines of processors?

Vista Gets Hacked

Well it looks like despite all Microsoft has done to prevent their newest operating system from being stolen, the pesky hackers around the world have devised a way to do it. Creating a fake license serial was the easy part, however, surpassing Microsoft's verification servers took a little more effort. All the hackers essentially did was tell the Vista operating system that a server of their choosing (containing the necessary return protocols) was the Microsoft verification server. Yeah, that's right, a DNS server; so simple. It's a very obvious strategy that can easily be done with the current XP operating system.

If XP was as challenging to pirate as Vista is, would this tactic have come about then instead of now?