At long last, Google has finally told the SEC what it’s expecting to receive for its initial public offering of 24.6 million shares - somewhere between $108 and $135 per share….

This is just another example of the infamous P.T. Barnum Theroem that states the congenitally stupid roam the earth in great numbers. I’d like to tell you that I bought a box/bag/jar/can/pound of Google the other day and it proved to be a superior product versus similar offerings from Yahoo!, but I can’t. Neither company produces anything. Both are, essentially, intellectual properties subject to the often fickle whim of the consumer.

I thought the ’90s were over. It would seem that many have not learned the lessons of history and are therefore doomed to repeat the mistakes. Shame.

It’s amazing how a company with the combined creative talents of Intel could shoot itself in the foot so badly and, apparently, so easily. By over-lapping older Northwood and new Prescott CPU speeds (3GHz-3.4GHz), Intel has created a huge indecision tree. The older processors are actually slightly faster than the newer ones, although the performance delta appears to shrink at the high end of their comparative speeds (and, theoretically, the Prescotts should start to come out ahead beyond 3.4GHz –if there were Northwoods at higher speeds. There aren’t.)

In the meantime I’ve seen vendors using 3GHz Prescott systems as their mainstream computers. Big mistake. Anything less than 3.4GHz (and possibly 3.4GHz itself) should be consigned to entry level where the prices are low enough to at least provide some meager incentive to buy them. Personally, if I was in the market to get a new computer now I’d try to weasel out of that market for a while longer until this whole Prescott v. Northwood thing shakes out.

If it ever, ever crosses your mind that we could come up with more interesting stories here, may we point your attention to the self-proclaimed Dullest Blog in the World?

You may have left your heart in San Francisco but the odds are very good that you lost your cell phone in Los Angeles. According to a poll commissioned by FusionOne, approximately 400 cell phones a month, or 4,800 a year, are sent to Los Angeles International Airport’s “lost and found” bin. Other more general points of separation anxiety include on air planes and in the back seats of taxi cabs. Of special note, Chicago’s Midway Airport gets about 16 lost cell phones per month but has almost 6,000 in inventory. Can you hear me now?

I know Rich Shim. We used to work together. He’s not the kind of guy who just mouths off about something half-heartedly. So when Shim reports: “Manufacturers Samsung, Creative Labs and Archos will promote the portability and ease of use [of portable video players], allowing consumers to record a late-night TV show, for example, and watch it on the subway during the morning commute. The device makers see the strong sales of Apple Computer’s iPod as an indication of mobile video’s potential.” I have to truly wonder if we aren’t actually seeing the last days of the world unfolding before us. I want my iTV?

Okay, so personally I happen to think that turning to open source software is going to end up as a colossal blunder to any of the corporate types out there that do so. (Except for IBM, of course, which isn’t making things so open source anyway.) There is nonetheless, a certain amount of admiration for how far this group of unkempt code seems to have traveled. (Except for IBM, of course, which wraps its open source code in pin-stripe packaging.) If you want to see what I mean, go read this CNN story.

nVidia has just released it’s latest group of Windows Certified Unified Drivers.

Key features of NVIDIA ForceWare Release 60 include:
* Support for the award-winning GeForce 6800-series GPUs
* Unmatched performance and enhanced image quality for Microsoft DirectX 9.0 and OpenGL-based software applications.
* Support for Microsoft Windows XP/2000/98/Me/NT4 and Windows XP 64-bit (for AMD Athlon 64, AMD Opteron 64, and Intel EMT64)
* Support for PCI Express-based NVIDIA GPUs
* Consumer electronic display support for DVI-based digital displays, such as widescreen plasma screens
* Quick Zoom – ease eye strain and enable ergonomic computing with easy Windows magnification
* Updated application profiles allow users to assign multiple profiles for each application

(It’s amazing how a manufacturer can hype its own stuff, isn’t it? Just go to www.nvidia.com/drivers if you’re runnning one of its “6 series” GeForce cards. There’s always a performace up-swing with the upgrade.)

High Tech Report Department: OK, so riding an elephant may not be the most high tech thing you have ever seen, but consider this. In Bangkok where this is being written and posted live, Alice is enjoying high speed WIRELESS Internet access in her hotel room, and her Blackberry was actually working in the jungles of the Masa Elephant Camp in Chaing Mai (Northern Thailand)shown here.

True, there were techincal quirks to be found - like being able to receive email and not respond on the Backberry. Alice called it “receive-only” and it suited her just fine. But Thailand is pretty high-tech, and it shames the local Best Western when you consider that most food here is eaten on the street and a taxi costs $3.00.