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Saturday, June 05, 2004

Ronald Reagan
Born: February 6, 1911
Died: June 5, 2004

Movie actor
First movie: "Love is in the air" - 1937
52 movie credits in his lifetime
Spokesman for the General Electric Company.
Hosted and acted on the General Electric Theater television series
Host of the television series, "Death Valley Days."
Five-time president of the Screen Actors Guild.
Democrat turned Conservative.
Governor of California 1966 - 1974
President of the United States 1981 - 1989
He was the oldest man elected president.
He was the first Hollywood actor to be elected president.
He was the first president whose daughter posed for Playboy.
He was the first president to have been divorced.
He appointed the first woman to the Supreme Court.
He was the eighth president to be the victim of an assassination.
He was the only president to survive a wound.
He was the major factor in ending the Cold War.
He was 77 years, 349 days old when he left office, Jan. 20, 1989.

Reagan is survived by his wife and three children
... and some 250 million Americans, who have lost a champion.

# Permalink Posted at 3:48 PM 1 comments Email this Link

Visits to AliceandBill.com drop on weekends
Statistics show that the number of visitors to Alice and Bill's AliceandBill.com blog drop significantly on weekends indicating that many bloggers are probably illegally using their computers at work to gain personal knowledge and satisfaction during the work week. Reached for comment, Bill said, "Hey, that's really terrible. If that's what these people are doing they should be forced to work Saturdays and Sundays as well."
# Permalink Posted at 4:47 AM 0 comments Email this Link

nVidia and AMD drop the hammer
"Recognizing the need to thwart network level hacking attacks and other security risks, NVIDIA Corporation today announced collaborative efforts with AMD and leading Taiwanese motherboard companies to help promote enhanced secure PC platform technology solutions and deliver innovative features and increased levels of protection for desktop PCs, workstations, and servers based on the NVIDIA nForce and AMD64 computing platform."

Let's be real... Unless they start equipping nForce motherboards with side-mounted police specials, RFID chips, and OnStar, if someone wants to take your PC --either physically or virtually-- there's really no way to stop it 100% of the time.
# Permalink Posted at 4:41 AM 0 comments Email this Link

The nVidia 300
Not yet convinced that Serial ATA-150 is really worth the effort, consumers may soon be greeted by Serial ATA-300 if nVidia has its way. "As part of the Company’s commitment to driving innovative integrated technologies into its single-chip MCP architectures, the NVIDIA SATA 3Gb/s solution will be incorporated into future NVIDIA nForce media and communications processors (MCPs) by the end of the year. NVIDIA will also be working with Hitachi, Maxtor, Samsung, and Seagate to ensure interoperability with its SATA 3Gb/s products for desktop, server, and workstation environments." Blah, blah, blah... Time frame is "later in the year." Look for motherboard and hard drive prices to go up accordingly. (See! I knew those rats in the hard drive industry were eventually going to find a way to shove ATA drive prices up to the sky with SCSI drives!)
# Permalink Posted at 4:30 AM 0 comments Email this Link

Friday, June 04, 2004

New Athlons
From the Press Release: "At Computex, AMD today raised PC performance to new heights with the launch of four new processors in the award-winning AMD Athlon(tm) 64 processor family featuring the exclusive Enhanced Virus Protection (EVP) capability for desktop and mobile computing when enabled by the upcoming Microsoft(r) Windows(r) XP Service Pack 2. The AMD Athlon 64 FX-53 and AMD Athlon 64 processors 3800+, 3700+ and 3500+ provide businesses and consumers world-class performance and a more secure computing environment. The AMD Athlon 64 processors are also the only desktop processors to offer an innovative power-management capability with AMD's Cool'n'Quiet(tm) technology." Forget the Virus Protection stuff. The FX-53 rocks!
# Permalink Posted at 3:49 AM 0 comments Email this Link

AMD Goes Down With Eric Clapton!
Get that image out of your mind. AMD announced that AMD64 technology will be the digital audio platform of choice to record Eric Clapton's Crossroads Guitar Festival concert at the Cotton Bowl in Dallas on Sunday, June 6, 2004. Tens of thousands of music fans are expected to attend the concert featuring a line-up of legendary guitar players. Scheduled to perform are Eric Clapton and Doyle Bramhall II, Carlos Santana, Jeff Beck, James Taylor, ZZ Top, Steve Vai, Robert Cray, Neal Schon, blues legend B.B. King (Go Lucille!!), and many more artists. The Sunday concert wraps up a three-day first-of-its-kind guitar festival dedicated to raising funds and awareness for Crossroads Centre, Antigua, the treatment and education center founded by Eric Clapton in 1997.
# Permalink Posted at 3:44 AM 0 comments Email this Link

Bill took a vacation!
I needed some sleep. So sue me!
# Permalink Posted at 3:39 AM 0 comments Email this Link

S3 OmniChrome
S3 (you remember the graphics chip manufacturer swallowed up by VIA) has just announced its OmniChrome multi-functional AGP8X PC graphics platform featuring a TV-Tuner, video input, Hi-Def HDTV capability, Chromotion programmable video technology and hardware DirectX 9 acceleration for the video enthusiast. OmniChrome features the latest 3rd generation high sensitivity and compact desktop video tuner modules, the 1216 and the 1236ME MK3 from Philips Electronics and a Techwell video decoder. Users of analogue video devices will be able to bridge the digital divide and capture real time video using S-Video, composite and component input directly into various digital formats and perform Hi-Def digital media playback at HDTV resolutions using the board's Hi-Def VIVO functionality. Personal Video Recording and TV Time shift/pause TV functionality are also supported. Before Alice gets too excited, that's VIVO, not TIVO.
# Permalink Posted at 3:39 AM 0 comments Email this Link

ULEAD giving away prizes....

Just in case you had nothing important to do this summer, check out Ulead's Summertime Video Contest. In exchange for 3 minutes of video created with Ulead's recently released VideoStudio 8.0 (available either for purchase or as a free download) you could win up to $3,500 in prizes. Of course, you're video would be subject to a barrage of judging and certain exclusions apply. What? You were going to try to tell me you had something to do this summer? Washing the dog doesn't count. Besides, top prize is a honkin' fast PC-based video editing system. And it's only 3 minutes....
# Permalink Posted at 3:13 AM 0 comments Email this Link

Thursday, June 03, 2004

Nokia Launches Skywriting Cell Phone
File this Under Weird Dept: Newsfactor Network has an interesting piece, "Nokia has announced the world's first cell phone that lets users write short text messages in mid-air. The messages are written using a row of LEDs fitted on the clip-on cover of Nokia's new 3220 camera phone, due to ship this summer in the European, Asian and American markets for around 250 euros (US$306.50).

"A motion sensor in the cell phone makes the lights blink in a sequence that spells out letters when the handset is waved. Nokia says that a quirk of human vision turns the sequence of letters into a message that hangs in mid-air."
# Permalink Posted at 11:11 AM 0 comments Email this Link

Secret Email Tracking Service Angers Privacy Advocates

The old school way to see if your email was opened was to use a receipt - an instant turn-off to the person you were contacting. Now a new service promises to secretly track your emails and see who really opened them and even how long they spent on your correspondence. DidTheyReadIt.com is angering privacy advocates, and causing all sorts of ethical controversy, but you can try it for free and see for yourself.
# Permalink Posted at 7:48 AM 0 comments Email this Link