Apples worldview

So there was some news today, the journalists at Gizmodo for two weeks ago was offered an unseen prototype of what might be the upcoming Iphone, it was lost by an Apple employee, and found by this other guy who appearently didn't know the employee, it's explained that he tried to get a hold of other people from apple using the phone. He then sold it to Gizmodo, nothing unusal there, it's like someone selling information or pictures to journalists. Gizmodo then broke the story, showing this prototype, Apple requested it back, and again, nothing unusal there, Gizmodo returned it.. End of story? Well of course not, because Apple is well known for wanting to keep their secrets and being quite the attention whore.. If you sense my dislike of Apple it's because of the latest news, first they called the police on the Gizmodo Journalist, using a law from the 1800(litterally!), and now they are pursuing the guy who found the phone in the bar, Proving that if you are are Tech Journalist and basically do exactly what other journalists are allowed to do, Apple will go Nazi on your ass. I've heard a lot of excuses about how it was theft and etc. bla bla bla, no one got hurt, no one did anything unusual, and had the laws been right Apple would have been told to stfu and accept that press is here for the people and not for Apples PR. And before people start telling me how the guy should have given it to the bartender and so on, ask yourself what you would have done, or might already have done in the same situation? I doubt you are so holy then.

This really gets to me because it's clearly an attempt to scare of others from breaking a story like this, when it shouldn't and it's potentially also an attempt to get some PR, if that's the case we see that Apple don't care if they get someone fired or put in prison for their own benifit. I would call for a boycott of Apple, this is simply too unethical to scare of press like this. I've already been a life long Apple boycotter :P never bought any Apple products, and now it seems I never will.

Here's the original stories @Gizmodo @Theinquirer

I would like to add one last point to all this, it has been suggested that Apple dropped the phone in the bar in the first place for someone to pick it up, I don't believe that actually, I think it's most likely some Apple Employee dropped it by accident, but I do think that this whole manhunt bs is pure publicity, and Apple loves it.

Apple vs Adobe

So this has been up quite some places, most noteably a employee of Adobe lashes out and tells Apple to go screw themselves, which is nice.

Now there's something that is true for every company, even Apple, every company you can think of, when they make a decision, follow the money! Do you honestly believe that Steve Jobs "concerns" are true? There's a lot of made up excuses out there, that he won't allow flash on the Iphone/Ipad/Ipod Touch because it will somehow take up more power, wich isn't that true, with the right optimisations there should be no problem there, most other phones can without loosing a lot of battery over it, I've read two opinions on this that I found to probably be more correct than the other bs, btw quickly the dumbest I've heard is that Steve Jobs is angry with Adobe for focusing on windows or whatever, I'll maybe get back to that.

No the two most accurate ideas I've heard is that Apple as a company doesn't want Flash applications to compete with the App Store, wich makes pretty perfect sense to me, there's a lot of apps on the Iphone that could easily be replaced by a web based Flash, you kind of see why they would do it, especially if you see it from a financial perspective, It does seem odd especially now with the Ipad that is suppose to be the internet machine, and with Flash being a pretty big part of the internet I think they will eventually give that up.

The other reason I was surprised to read and I never thought about, A lot of the flash you see around the web is Flash based, and appearently Apple have their own iAd wich will now have room to shine.

Now both of these ideas are somewhat stupid and even unethical, but the worst was definitely the decision to dictate what code languages they will accept onto their App store, Now if you thought Microsoft was bastards for theire ways of doing things, even they aren't that bad, like Microsoft aren't big on Open source, but they still allow development for games using OpenGL(An open source competitor to Microsofts DirectX) They will sometimes be a little slow with implementing it, but they won't tell you: No! you can't run Quake Wars on this OS. that would be madness, and yet that's exactly what Apple is trying to do, I'm not sure if I belive the idea that it's about Adobe this time, more of Apple trying to control their own market more.

I just realized writing this, if they are able to pull this one off they essentially dictate the terms they can work under, they Won't lazy work, and they will "fire" you from the App store if you don't follow their rules, what you realize after a while is, if they can pull this off they practially have developers hired to do work for Apple without Apple paying the developers to work, now I'm pretty sure Apple doesn't require developers to work every day and so on, but it's still getting people to sell your product, does anyone know who made that voice rapping thing program for the Iphone? Nope, but we all know it comes for the Iphone.

I think the whole, Steve Jobs doesn't like them! thing is old and over, and more a cover, remember Steve Jobs was fired as the CEO before they hired him again, now I don't know exactly what the reasons were back then but I'm pretty sure they wouldn't re-hire him to let him act like a child. The issues are always concerning competition or something else, and I find that much more likely to being the motivation rather than Steve Job's personal feelings towards the CEO of another company. Like the whole google thing, the Android is becoming a real competitor to the Iphone, or rather Android based smartphones, So yeah don't belive the drama, because that's all it is, these people only see money.

Kim

Randomly signing out.

AMD's first good laptop CPU?

So it's no secret, if there was a scale or a marker between AMD and Intel and the middle represented complete objectiveness, Yes I am indeed closer to AMD than Intel, why? Simple, AMD is the smaller company, but they are also the only company competing with Intel, So for the idiots I so often read being way too fanboyish in this "fight" rooting for AMD's demise, I always tell, well it's going to suck without AMD you wouldn't have the I7 or the entire Core 2 Duo/Quad if AMD had never been there to compete, you would probably still be struggling to keep you Prescott P4 cold, and sucking on Hyperthreading on a singel core CPU.

But as much as I like AMD I've always told myself I won't buy a bad products, not even from AMD, I didn't buy the Phenom because of the whole TLB thing, and I haven't bought a laptop with AMD, I've sometimes suggested it just to find that yeah it was cheap, but it sadly gets very hot, the reason for this I guess is that AMD is using a arrchitecture for all their CPU's that originally was intended for Desktop and Server use, and it seems they can never get a CPU to be as cool or efficient on laptop as Intel. Intel not too long ago released the Atom CPU, it's basically making a CPU as powerefficient as possible, but also as small as possible and it won't really need to be a great CPU performance wise, so a singel core 1.6GHz Atom will perform about the same as a 900MHz Pentium 3, but that's still pretty cool because the Atom really uses a small amount of energy. So I was looking with interest at AMD's competing offering, and there were the Neo CPU that is basically a cut down Athlon 64, so I was skeptical with how good it actually be, I've only had my hands onto one model the HP DV2 And I have to admit the design was sexy, but it was sadly the typical AMD laptop experience, it was hot and not really as close to the Atom as I'd like. Well lately I service the Packard Bell Dot M/A NC900 netbook PC, and my favorite kind of service, stresstesting! And I'm happy to say that after about 20 hours of stresstesting it's not too hot, it's in fact perfect, the design is sexier and even smaller than the DV2, the screen is HD despite the fact that it's only 11.6" It has a nice webcam, and it has onboard ATI graphics, you should be able to watch HD movies on this little bastard, the CPU is a 1200MHz Athlon 64, now the Original Athlon or K7 core was in fact faster than Pentium 3 and this is the Athlon 64 core so this should be quite a lot faster than the Atom CPU, I haven't yet been able to check the Battery yet, but this is definitely a small and lovely laptop I'd love to own with AMD in for once.

What excites me about this is this laptop represents the way I want AMD to go, like Intel they should offer complete platforms and make them good, they already do that, like the Puma platform, but the Puma has the performance, but lacks the experience you get with a Intel Centrino Duo mobile, fast and cool, and it seemed like AMD needed to find something to work from, the one thing AMD would excel at, is platform, they have the best low power chipset, they are both cool and very powerful compared to Intels onboard offerings. With the right CPU or mobile architecture they will not only be able to keep up with Intel on Server and desktop machines, and as I've said a million times, I want competition all over, that means progress, my favorite scenario is AMD 49 and Intel 49% constantly fighting over the last two percent with a lot of great products.

But yeah this does more show that the Athlon 64 when scaled down and tweaked makes a very decent mobile CPU, it's far from having an actual mobile architecture just yet, I do however belive it gives the Mobile team at AMD goals and guidelines, and damnit I want a competing AMD laptop platform! hehe.

I'm still working on the Part 2 of my PC guide the Cheap gamer part, but the thing is I have to do some research plus I work a lot of overtime So hang in there, it's coming! :P.

The laptop I talked about is here

The PC guide Part 1/3 the family PC.

I'm a fan of customized PC's sure you might have to pay a little more, but it's honestly worth it!

I work at a place where we service computers, so I see what computer manufacture do wrong, most frustrating error, and this is usally cheap manufactures like Packard Bell, E-System, and Medion(Or whatever they call themselves in your country) is powersupply, and it makes sense, it's hard to tell people that, Hey this computer has the same specs as that cheap PC, but this one is better because it has a 550W powersupply! the first thing people ask me as I tell them about what powersupply is, So does it use the amount of W? and that's understandable because 550W is a hell of a lot, but of course it doesn't use that, it's simply saying what the powersupply is capable of delivering, and I think most computers are idle something like 85% of the time, and with the new innovations in powersaving your computer will be consuming basically nothing while using it for browsing the internet or writing something. I've seen computers with quadcore CPU's and dual video cards with a 400W powersupply, and I just want to pull my hair out, and I honestly didn't think anyone would use anything less than a 300W powersupply for a standard desktop, but oh no, the ones I often have to chance a powersupply on have a cheap 250W, and it wouldn't be that bad if it was only the powersupply that had to be changed, but way to often it will take down the harddisk with it.

The next thing is motherboard, I always try and keep an open mind, so when a company fails, I look forward seeing them making an impressive return, there is one company that I hate, and I hope fails! I honestly hope they never ever get success and just dissappears, they don't make competition, they're just a horrible electronics company, it is ECS, I first encountered ECS while working at a PC store where we made custom made PC's and we decided for our budget PC's we would try this motherboard maker. The worst decision ever, it was so bad that we didn't even care to try and find errors on them when they got returned, we just short circuited them, and make sure they were broken. And I wasn't surprised when I saw the same company had motherboards failing where I work now, it's a cheap motherboard in every sense, and here's the other problem with them, you get horrible performance, it's disgusting to see someone piss on consumers like ECS does it.(Yes I have a huge problem with them!) You usually get what you pay for, but not with ECS, you get ten times more value getting Asrock, wich is also cheap, but atleast gives you something useable.

My own experience is that motherboard builders you can count on is MSI, Asus, Intel, where as them you can't really count on is ECS, PC chips(also ECS owned, who could have guessed?) and Soltek, which I can with joy say aren't making motherboards anymore. Now I don't mind someone trying to make cheap motherboards, what I do mind is when someone makes complete crap! something almost guaranteed to fail because of cheap components, and horrible design.

I mentioned Asrock because I usually have good experience with them, I wouldn't use it for my own PC, but that's because I'm a nerd, if I was ever to buy a TV I wouldn't get one less that 1080P again because I'm a nerd. But I can recognize that Asrock works for most people, it's cheap, it performs decent, they have some motherboards that for my taste is a little overly gimmicky, but atleast it works wich is more than you can say about ECS's standard motherboards.

But yes now that I'm done ranting about ECS, it's about time I walk the walk, so I'm going to go through some of the details for custom made PC's for what needs you should have. There's the family PC as I like to call it, a low power PC that's not just filled with slow components, it seems to be the biggest problem of builders, they seem to think, hey let's just put the cheapest and slowest components in this PC, and that's just not the case, that will just give you a horribly bad PC.

Now motherboard, the most important is to go after a combination that works well, and if you are looking to make a family friendly PC, that not only will be low power, but also fast, responsive, and be able to play smaller games, and even HD movies if needed, you need to go for a motherboard with the chipset combination of 78xG/890G and SB7xx/SB850 why? well it's produced by ATI/AMD, it's really low power, and low heat output, so even with a dusty PC your chipset won't overheat(Trust me, I've seen it!), next thing you need is a CPU, and there's a lot out there, but today a low power Dual core is enough for most users, currently you can get AMD Athlon II x2 really cheap and really low power (65W at 2.8GHz) a quick note about AMD CPU's they are in fact pretty good quality, but! the reason some people will complain and understandably so is AMD sells two kinds, In a Box, and OEM, OEM basically means CPU and only CPU, and yeah they aren't treated the best, and sadly they seem to have a lot of errors, but I've never seen an AMD CPU sold as in a box with any problems, and you get a decent cooler with it.

Next you need memory, this is a pretty nice thing about AMD, their CPU's are very compatible with older products, currently all Athlon II's are for the socket AM3, in AMD's platforms that means it's the socket coupled with DDR3 memory, but you can put the CPU in an AM2+ motherboard as well if you want to go with DDR2 memory, it doesn't matter that much when building a PC for normal use, fact is that DDR2 memory is still performing really well, so whatever has the best price, and what you will need is anywhere from 2Gb and over, I recommend 4Gb and a 64bit operating system.

Then there's the harddisk, harddisks are pretty cheap to get a whole lot of space, a 500Gb or 750Gb is more than enough for casual use, even if you take a lot of pictures and have a lot of kids games on it. luckily there's no ECS of harddisks, I've had most good experiences with Seagate, but it honestly doesn't matter in a casual PC, DVD drives I would say it's almost the same, but if you want something quiet, Asus and. Samsung makes some great drives. now if you want to build it from the bottom up, as I would, next thing we look at is case, again do you want the big case next to the desktop, or would you like a small box under the screen? like if you want a small box you need to make sure the motherboard fits in it, and how small? The standard small, is called Micro ATX, and you can get some cases that small that they have their own custom made powersupply, if that's the case, a 200-250W is actually enough because we have already focused on making it really low power. but I would recommend getting a case where you can use a normal powersupply because then you can choose one that is low noise as well, and in case it should break it's easy to change. Now with motherboards again, you can use Micro ATX in a normal ATX case, but you can't use an ATX motherboard in a Micro ATX case, A final note on cases, don't go for the cheapest, unless you want to cut yourself, or damage your local tech guy, I recommend Antec, but they are pricey, if you just want something cheap and yet decent Aopen, CoolerMaster, I would avoid Codegen, and generally too cheap cases, the best way to recognize them is the gimmick they have while still being cheap, I have a nasty scar on my hand that is my reason(and yet I don't hate it like I hate ECS). Now powersupplies, again there's no direct ECS of powersupplies, but there's some damn cheap ones. Want quality? there's the following companies to go after. Corsair, Antec, Seasonic, OCZ, Chieftec, and Zalman, and for that PC? 300 or 450W I would take the 450W if you think you might want to upgrade, and with a 450W you could put in a pretty decent video card without problems. We're pretty close to being done, Now screen? Well most screens today are pretty ok, so one thing I would say is important is that you chose one with the right resolution, because LCD screens are build for their max resolution, so if you feel like setting it down to some other resolution the picture quality simply won't look good, the easiest way to show this is, if you have an LCD screen right now, try and put it on the lowest resolution possible, and then look at the edges of your cursor as you move it around.

Looks nasty doesn't it?

I have a 22" inch Samsung screen running with the resolution of 1680x1050, and that has a pretty decent size, and they come at a very decent price. If you don't know how you feel about the resolutions, I would try and go to a store and see if they have running examples, and feel free to explore the menu because sometimes the quality will look strange because some idiot went over and ruined the standard settings on it. If you want a more movie friendly screen you basically just need to make sure that the format is 16:9 the resolution I mentioned earlier is 16:10, today these are pretty much the only formats that matters, I liked the old 4:3 as you see on most CRT screens, but it's simply too expensive and 16:x screens work.

Keyboard mouse? Go nuts! for a casual PC it matters so little, of course I would recommend a decent Logitech kit since they work, and if you want wireless they work even better, now if you want something ergonomic, Microsoft has some really interesting keyboards, I use the Microsoft Natural 4000 myself and it's awesome!

Time to end on some notes about my choices, first of all I think someone will challenge me on why I didn't chose Intel, and the answer is simple really, Intel's low end platform doesn't belong in a family setting, their chipsets with onboard graphics is simply too weak, I am writing this on a Lenovo T500, it's a intel based laptop with their supposedly better onboard graphics at the time, the GMA4500, and yeah I can't even play HD movies on it, the 78XG/890G does it for breakfast, you can get some intel based boards with nVidia onboard, and while it's certainly better than intels own chipset on that front, it still has it's problems, with heat and power compared to ATI's offering. Intel definitely have some decent CPU's but so does AMD, and AMD's are cheaper, and faster than the Intel CPU's priced the same.

I actually planned to make this blog about small home PC, a cheap gamer PC, and the ultimate gam0r PC'z?!?!+1 But seeing how long this is already I will make them seperate. I didn't write any prices because the prices are different from country to country, and so is the lovely currency, but one we all know is the US dollar, a quick calculation fronm DKK to USD would bring this PC around 6-700$ for a complete PC.

Stay around for Part 2, which might come tomorrow.. Bwahahaa...

Fermi, late party crasher?

For those who doesn't know. Fermi is the codename for the new nVidia GPU released, or graphicscard since the specs were with memory and everything, now this was suppose to come and blow the competition away(ATI/AMD), now one thing I would like to say, I'm a very optimistic guy, almost to a fault, but when someone is delaying a release of something, even I'm not positive, and you will start to see the fanboys who will cheer the product even if it fails. Let's go back some years.. Back to the end of 2002 and the beginning of 2003, ATI had at that time already released a new impressive GPU the 9700 series, or R300, this card did actually blow it's competition away, nVidia had the Gefore 4 TI series, and they didn't really stand a chance, so nVidia were about to release something new and interesting, but it was delayed, and a lot of the same things were said about it as there were said about the Fermi, and the same fanboys where all happy about it, I were skeptical, although not as much as I were with Fermi, and trust me I weren't any ATI fanboy, I had a Geforce 4 TI 4200 at that time. So what happened with nVidia back then? well they released the Geforce FX 5800 later known as the DustBuster!(not by nVidia of course.), this was the definition of fail, the card tanked, it was hot and needed to use a noisy 2 slot cooler, the first of it's kind so this thing was light green when you saw it, and there were made jokes about it, and one that stuck was DustBuster. And of course it didn't blow the competition away, in some tests it even got beaten by the Geforce 4 TI4600, nVidia were quick to release the FX5900 and started competing on price which was the only reason I ended up buying a FX5900 in the end.

before that I wanted 9700 Pro or the later released 9800 series. Don't get me wrong, I had a whole lot of fun with my FX5900, it was the time of Bios flashing on graphics cards, which in normal terms mean, renaming you graphics card, the thing is usually when more cards are released, like the FX5900 and the FX5950, there's a big chance they are sharing the same GPU, and you just need to either overclock them using an application, or force them into to "thinking" they are this other card. The main difference between FX5900 and FX5950 was the amount of memory, 5900 had 128Mb usually, and the 5950 had 256Mb usually, well I bought an Albatron FX5900 with 256Mb memory, so I was pretty happy when I succesfully got it to boot up with the name FX5950, and it wasn't as easy as it sounds, because I had to make sure the timings were right, there's a lot to fiddle around with. but yes, moving along.

So when I heard the same about Fermi, I was expecting the worst, and here's why, when someone delays a release it's not because they are trying to improve it, it's usually because they are trying to fix it, and usually it's a rush to fix it, so yeah expect bad results, the same happened with Intel, when the Prescott was released.

But the Fermi came out, so how does the results look? well not as bad as the FX5800 for sure, but not great either, only 10% better in some games than the Radeon HD5870, and 150$ more expensive, plus a much higher power consumption, in fact someone showed that you were better off if you bought 2x HD5770 and ran them in Crossfire(Dual card mode), now there is another side to this, the Fermi is also used for nVidia's HPC(High Power Computing) or CUDA project, wich is using the GPU to make calculations many times faster than any AMD or Intel CPU ever could. And the Fermi does pretty well in that, and that's all great, but if they focus too much on that, ATI will take over the gaming marked, Intel tried lately to make their own GPU and Intel is the biggest tech company out there, even they had to abandon it because you simply can't jump into the market like that, many have tried, over and over again we see they won't succeed, Via, Sis, and Intel, all companies that looked like they had something interesting, but either had something that failed or abandoned it altogether. So nVidia might make the best HPC processors ever, but that won't help them keep up in the gamer marked.

Some people might notice I'm focusing on high end cards here, there's also the mid range, but yeah there's almost no competition, ATI/AMD dominates with the only DirectX 11 midrange cards out there, now DirectX is basically what effects you will see used in games, one good example of this is Doom 3, play it in DX8.1 and you will notice the lack of some effects like heat emissions and such, while in DX9 they will be there, and they will run nicely since the card is optimized for it. I hope we see some midrange from nVidia but something tells me they just aren't focused on that part of the market anymore, but we shall see, I want competition all over the place.

So yeah, I think nVidia need to get back in the game because someone who isn't a fanboy wouldn't buy a Fermi/GTX480, unless they really have too much money and don't mind their power bill being raped.

Currently ATI/AMD seems most attractive although I am a little sad they won't be seeing more competition on high end because currently the HD5870 and HD5970(wich is in fact faster than Fermi) are priced too high, and yeah some competition would probably have changed that, you can't really blame a company for making a nice profit when they can.