At this point half of the cost increases are either still being mulled over or are still being negotiated, so it’s not clear if prices to end users will increase and if so how much.

I definitely don’t miss the days of $150 “budget” motherboards back in the day and the $120 price for a 1GB DDR2-667 stick from 8-12 months ago but it had to happen sooner or later. You can only make the same thing cheaper for so long before you have to stop lowering or increase the price to say in business.  Also, I’d much rather pay a few bucks more than end up with total junk.

For more info on Havok’s new plans click here.

From the info on XbitLabs, they say “Swift will feature two x86 cores along with a graphics core and will be aimed at mobile computers,” and go on to say “Later on quad-core microprocessor with integrated memory controller is possible.” This information makes it appear that AMD is taking a step backwards by moving the memory controller from the CPU back to the northbridge motherboard chipset. This would lower performance but shouldn’t impact power usage that much. The last CPUs that didn’t have an integrated memory controller was their Socket A Athlon XP line. This also means it would require unique chipsets and motherboard designs, upping the cost of designing products to use the AMD Fusion.

Another thing to think about is if it has graphics in the CPU, that means the heat from graphics and the heat from the CPU will have to be removed by the same heatsink setup. The end result could be that the Fusion will need more cooling than what is normally required because their’s more wattage coming from one chip.

Much of the specs and information on the AMD Fusion and Swift are still up in the air, so hopefully it makes more sense once it gets closer to it’s release, which is supposed to be second half 2009.

The last thing is ALL the pictures I’ve seen of the MacBook Air shows it with the screen straight up at a right angle with the base. For example the pics on DailyTech and Slate, though Anandtech has a pic that shows it at an angle past 90 degrees, but it appears to be a computer rendering and not an actual picture. Well, I don’t know about you but I sure don’t use a laptop like that. I tilt the screen farther than 90 degrees until I can see it well and their’s no glare or reflection on the screen. The potential problem with the MacBook Air is if the base doesn’t have enough weight to keep the laptop from tilting and falling onto the top of the LCD screen because of the weight of having a full normal size screen tilted past 90 degrees. If this does turn out to be an issue, I here by copyright iLegs as a device to keep the laptop from falling towards the screen when you tilt the screen back. They do show it at a slight angle past 90 degrees in the MacBook Air Guided Tour but it’s still unknown if their’s a threshold at which point it will topple over or not. This potential issue plus how rounded the bottom is, can you even use it on your lap or one leg without it sliding off or flipping towards the screen and cascading to the ground?

Ok, so lets review, you can get a notebook that is 0.76″ thick but you have to bring along with you an external optical drive, a USB2.0 Ethernet adapter, a USB2.0 hub so you can use more than one USB2.0 device at a time and a mini-DVI to DVI adapter. Having to carry even part of that with you greatly negates the supposed appeal of having such a thin notebook. Plus you can’t carry an extra battery. Going on a long plane ride and want to have extra battery? Tough. Once your battery dies you can slide it into your bag and stare in wonderment at the extra half inch you saved in thickness only for the rest of the trip. Plus the whole potentially tipping over thing and not being able to use it on one leg/your lap.

Unless you’re one of the 10 people that exclusively uses a laptop to go to the internet through WiFi only and needs it to be very small and portable I don’t get it. Plus, if that’s all you do with a laptop, why wouldn’t an Eee PC fit the bill, it has Firefox and WiFi.  If you use the laptop as more than just an Internet Applieance then why is having a normal laptop that’s only marginally thicker such a drag that you’re willing to buy basically half a laptop for $1799?

The topic it’s self is pretty interesting though, as their isn’t a whole lot of information available on this kind of thing. I mean, you can look at different services to see the average uptime for a webhost or datacenter or colo but how are you to know how secure the facility actually is? They’re probably just trying to sell the computers and probably aren’t bringing the servers back to a warehouse to data mine the hard drives but who’s to say that won’t happen in the future… may make you think twice about checking that “save my credit card info” check box next time you check out of a webstore.

The conspiracy theorist in me thinks there has to be something going on. The only thing I can think of is that Nvidia didn’t like being short changed in the deal, with manufacturers making factory OC’ed versions of the 8800 GT and charging even more money on top of the already inflated price of the base cards but paying Nvidia the same amount for the chips/cards and blocking some of the anticipation for the 8800 GTS by delivering a card with similar performance at prices nearly $100 cheaper and cutting Nvidia out of the profits. All this is completely an off the wall guess that may or may not be true… Color me Micheal Bay (except I didn’t make any awful movies)… But seriously, how can it be months later and 8800 GT’s are still kinda hard to get? I just checked and ZipZoomFly has 8800GT’s for barely less than $300, Newegg has none in stock at all, mwave has a few and TigerDirect has a few but it’s still slim pickings.

Anyway, it does appear that Nvidia may be trying to remedy the problem as they’re in talks with their main foundry partner TSMC to increase wafer orders for G92 GPUs and have added another, UMC, but that appears to only be for the new G98 GPUs.

As you probably know, Microsoft general counsel Brad Smith recently said in a Fortune article, that the Linux kernel violates 42 Microsoft patents, Linux GUI infringes 65 patents, that Open Office violates 45 and various open source e-mail clients infringe on 15. With 68 more patents supposedly infringed by other free/open source programs. Microsoft has now said it is not going to be suing users of linux and open source. That doesn’t rule out Distros or computer manufacturers that ship PCs with Linux preinstalled. Their goal is to strike deals similar to the cross licensing deal it made with Novell a few months back. Part of the problem with Microsoft’s plan is The Free Software Foundation has a proposed change to the GPL that would prohibit such an agreement. They said that if that happens, the deals like the one they have with Novell is only “one particular way of dealing with this problem. It’s not the only way in which the problem can be addressed.” I’m not sure what that means besides just suing the developer/distributors of Linux and open source but as that change to the GPL is still only proposed we’ll just have to see how this shakes out.

Microsoft also said that they won’t be publicly disclosing which patents they think are infringed, but “Microsoft has made the patents in question known to corporate Linux users and distributors.” according to InformationWeek. Which is one of problems Linus Torvalds see’s in Microsoft’s claims, stating that “Naming them would make it either clear that Linux isn’t infringing at all (which is quite possible, especially if the patents are bad), or would make it possible to avoid infringing by coding around whatever silly thing they claim.” “They’d have to name the patents then, and they’re probably happier with the FUD [fear, uncertainty, doubt] than with any lawsuit,” Torvalds predicted. Also that, “It’s certainly a lot more likely that Microsoft violates patents than Linux does, Basic operating system theory was pretty much done by the end of the 1960s. IBM probably owned thousands of really ‘fundamental’ patents,” Torvalds said in a response to questions submitted by InformationWeek. But he doesn’t like any form of patent saber rattling. “The fundamental stuff was done about half a century ago and has long, long since lost any patent protection,” he wrote.”

Sun CEO and President, Jonathan Schwartz replied to the situation, without actually mentioning Microsoft (or SCO, the company suing IBM for Linux copyright infringements). He talks about when Sun was pushing only high priced systems with Solaris OS on SPARC hardware and were loosing many customers to Linux OS and x86 hardware. “With business down and customers leaving, we had more than a few choices at our disposal. We were invited by one company to sue the beneficiaries of open source. We declined. We could join another and sue our customers. That seemed suicidal. We were offered the choice to scuttle Solaris, and resell someone else’s operating system. We declined. And we were encouraged to innovate by developers and customers who wanted Sun around, who saw the value we delivered through true systems engineering.” He then talks about some of the things they’ve done to get back the customers they lost. It’s seems to basically be fairly similar to what IBM has done and how most Linux Distros seem to make money, through customers paying for service and tech support. The main difference is Sun still sells hardware, they’ve made new UltraSPARC hardware and cheaper x86 hardware as well.

I agree that it’s pretty obvious that suing your customers is a bad idea, I’m not sure how Microsoft switching to a service only company would work out. I’ve heard people say that Microsoft sells Windows basically at cost and make their money on Office and server products. Well, why not make a “real” Office for Linux and start cashing in?

By the way, the best price I’ve found so far is TigerDirect has the HD-A2 for $139.99

So the moral of the story is unless you’re trying to find an excuse to replace that old eMachine, then replace the power supply before it fries the motherboard or more.

I then found ePreserver from Connected Software. I figured I’d give it a shot since it looked pretty straight forward, had a “30-day, 100% Money Back guarantee” and it was only $25 anyway. After registering I didn’t have to wait for a key via e-mail since it shows you right on the receipt page. I might suggest not getting the $3.99 “Extended Download Service” since I downloaded the demo/trial version and just plugged the key into that and it turned into the full version, meaning you should be able to just download the trial and make it the full version later as well. It was as straight forward as it looked on the webpage. After installing it, you just run it, plug in the registration info, pick which AOL screen name you want to export, choose a few settings, pick what you want to import them too (in my case Outlook 2003) and it does it’s thing. I didn’t even need to do anything to get it to show up in Outlook. I launched Outlook and it was all their. It automatically put the e-mails and contacts in the Outlook PST file, even made folders sorted like it was in AOL. I haven’t checked thoroughly but I did take a look and everything seems to be their. When I said above, the “choose a few settings” part, at one point you can change some settings on what it will import. I suggest setting it to at least “allow duplicates” under contacts/address book, since some versions of AOL make you create a new contact per e-mail address. I’m not sure how it would handle it if you had two contacts named the same thing with different e-mail addresses but I figured it’s easier too just do it manually than maybe not import some of the contacts. They have some screen shots of the process here.

I kind of would have liked a few more options, like if I wanted it to just make it’s own new PST file so I could import it into Outlook myself if I wanted too. For example, if you wanted to export one of the AOL accounts into outlook and put in a different computer’s Outlook or even a different profile on the same computer, you would have run the program and then export it from Outlook to a PST file manually. Kind of a pain but it’s doable.

Just to let everyone know, I’m not getting anything by linking them, we aren’t an affiliate or anything. I just figured I’d give everyone a heads up, since that’s part of why many people are keeping AOL because they don’t want to lose their info. I was glad it worked, since I’m building my parents a new computer, I didn’t want to have to install AOL so they could view old e-mails and hope it doesn’t break things (now or with a future “upgrade”).

I’ve installed Windows XP before, with multiple different Nvidia and ATI video cards with this Soyo monitor and haven’t had anything like this before. For the record though, none of them have been on-board video. I don’t know what is actually making this happen but I’d say it isn’t going to be a Soyo only problem. We’ve sold Soyo monitors for a little while in the store I work at and haven’t had any problems like this, so not all Soyo monitors on all systems will have this happen. Also, other monitors may be affected, as very few companies that sell monitors actually manufacturer them. So other companies monitors made by the same ODM manufacturer that Soyo had make my monitor may be affected as well.

Just thought I’d give people a heads up if they were having the same problem, as it was pretty frustrating for a while there.

Oh, and just my luck, I was using ATI Catalyst w/ southbridge drivers version 7.9 and of course they released 7.10 a few days ago. So now I’m super curious if that would somehow fix it… So I’ll probably end up reinstalling windows again and use the new video driver. I’m just too curious! If I do I’ll post back with the results.

Edit: And now the brown Zune is $99.99 at buy.com

So I ordered a Zune 30… Wish me luck! I’ll keep you posted on how I like it. Though I think the new firmware isn’t out yet, so it’s not going to be as cool as when the new firmware is released.

Edit: And now the brown Zune 30 can be had for $139.99

Edit2: And now the brown Zune is $99.99 at buy.com

It’s still unknown if the iPod touch will have bluetooth and could only confirm what was already reported that it has WiFi support. The webpage that disassembled an iPod touch, iFixIt, did not find a bluetooth chip but they did say it could be one of the unmarked chips.

For the full pictures and writeup on the dismantling of the iPod touch, check out iFixit.com.

click here for DailyTech’s writeup on this info.