Sounds like AMD is about to up the ante:

“Tomorrow will be remembered as the day that AMD catapulted the IT industry forward with the launch of the Dual-Core AMD Opteron™ processor, the industry’s first and only x86 processor designed from the ground up for multi-core computing.

“On April 21, 2005, AMD Chairman of the Board, President and CEO Hector Ruiz and his executive leadership team will be joined on stage by key partners and customers for the AMD Opteron Anniversary Event in New York to unveil this new multi-core technology. During this event, AMD will explain the key elements of the new technology and discuss how multi-core computing will enhance the way we live and work.” –Thanks David

More Details and Webcast Info Here

Here’s a guy who put a lot of time and thought into solving the next frontier: high speed access on the real superhighway. This is a long read but an incredible look at the issues and pitfalls

Project Background:
“I’ve always liked the concept of having a mobile access point. Sure, you can always put a radiomodem in a PCMCIA slot or use a celphone over bluetooth but that limits you to having a single machine online. What if you want to bring your friends along with you? Yes, I know you can re-share a dialup connection from one machine to another but that seems somehow inelegant. I don’t like the idea of other laptops having to be dependent on mine for their data feed. Still, all these links were rather slow and had terrible coverage. Get out of the city and into real higway driving and you either had terrible speed or no data at all. Satellite, at it’s dollars-per-minute cost, wasn’t a viable option. I used to have viable mobile data back in the mid-nineties via the Richochet system. I loved their stuff. Alas, they died long before even the dot.coms did.

“For years now I’ve been hearing about people hacking together their own WiFi routers with old hardware and Linux so figured it couldn’t be hard to do the same — just with EVDO as the backhaul. I went digging for an old laptop to try this on and came up dry. Hrrrm. If I had to buy something for this it was going to be much less fun. I might as well see if there’s a pre-made one I could just go buy instead. Off to Google I went.
WWAN Router Links

“The news was unfortunate. The devices ran anywhere from a respectable $600 (if you bought your subscription from the router provider) to a ludicrous $1400 and up. On top of that they were closed systems; no real expandability. If I’m going to buy a premade router I’ll wait a few years until there’s a $80 throwaway Linksys at Fry’s or something. The good part, though, is that they were stable and solid, with support for numerous cards (EVDO, UTMS, EDGE, etc.); very plug-and-play.”

Read the Complete How-To Here

We’ve been worried about the PSP. It didn’t have the blow-out sold-out sales record everyone expected, but it has turned into an underground hit. But today, using the trusty porn theory of technology success, there may be hope for the platform. (The theory is that if there is a porn angle, the technology takes off. (Think VCR, DVD, telephone, Internet, etc.)

“Playboy obviously feels that PSP owners are sex-obsessed geeks who like to look at picture of naked laydees (and who are we to argue) as they are about to offer nude and non-nude galleries specially formatted for Sony’s portable console. According to CNNMoney, John. D. Thomas, editor of Playboy.com said, “We know that many Playboy fans are also gaming enthusiasts who are likely to buy this type of device, so it was a natural progression for us to design this.” SonyPSP review

You have to join Playboy’s Cyberclub to view the galleries.

Seriously,…Uh…I thought this was a gaming handheld?

By David Johnston
Contributing Writer, RealTechNews.com

The Inquirer is reporting that AMD may be releasing more than just some new speed bumps and dual-core Opteron server chips tomorrow. Apparently they were shown a document that claims the Athlon 64 X2 dual-core series will be launched at the same time (tomorrow) and will boast ratings up to 4800+ though the true speed of the cores is not given.

Intel and AMD have recently entered a race to introduce the first x86 dual-core CPU and, until now, it had looked like Intel would win the race on the desktop front while AMD would win on the server front. Intel had already moved up its dual core release date to beat AMD’s expected release date. Now, however, it’s beginning to look like we may see AMD dual core chips from desktop to server before Intel has its chips out the door (HP listed dual core Opteron servers on their website already though the pages were quickly taken down).

One other nice thing about the AMD dual core chips is that they will be pin-compatible with current socket 939 and 940 motherboards and will only require a BIOS upgrade if all goes smoothly. Intel’s dual core solution, however, will require you to get a new motherboard. This will be a great win for AMD if it manages to get a successful dual core launch off before Intel, making them both the first to 1Ghz and the first to offer dual core. On top of all of this, Microsoft’s Windows XP Professiona 64-bit Edition should be coming out any day now (MSDN subscribers already have access to the final version in fact).

Things are looking interesting. Source: The Inquirer

Yes, the PSP is on every bus shelter, billboard, subway, and so on (at least in Tokyo anyway), but did Sony misstep in marketing the product as more of a portable movie device than a kick-ass gaming unit? And now a portable porn device?

Let’s look at some facts: After an $800 million ad campaign, Sony did not sell one million units the first week. In fact, “analyst P.J. McNealy said that the gaming retailers have already sold through two waves of hardware but big box retailers like Target and Wal-mart got more units than expected at launch and have inventory remaining. McNealy estimated the PSP sold as many as 575,000 units in its first week, with up to 300,000 left in the inventory channel.

“The PlayStation Portable (PSP) has been solid but not spectacular. We believe that the PSP launch, while not the blow-out event expected, will be considered successful as retailers continue to sell through existing inventory levels,” McNealy said in a note. With sales of console games slowing as manufacturers prepare for the next generation of game hardware, the industry is counting on the handheld market to pick up much of the sales slack in calendar 2005. Most analysts expect U.S. software sales growth to be flat to up 5 percent this year.” Nemesis Online

Our take: Sony forgot to mention the games. Video and music playback is actually not something to crow about, and to date, we have yet to hear of a hand held game like the Super Mario release for the Gameboy to cause a break-out hit. One exception may be Lumines.

Only “saving” grace: today’s announcement of Playboy for the PSP. But isn’t it all about the games?

Alice Says:
People tend to look at Cookies in two ways: extreme suspiscion, or “who cares if a website remembers my name and login?” Well, today is going to shift the scale for some people thasnks to a disturbing technology called PIE or Persistent Identification Element.

PIE is a “technology that lets a web site know if a cookie is missing, and it will look for the missing cookie in Macromedia’s Flash Player local shared objects. If the cookie is there, PIE will put it back in your browser. While this will happen mostly with advertising cookies, it opens the door to more insidious uses.

How to Disable Locally Shared Objects

Google Maps has already caused a stir with all sort of services and people finding new ways every day to take the mapping to a new level. But until today it was limited to the United States.

Today you can jump the pond and take a look at jolly old. It’s a “beta” of course, but we didn’t have to mention that.

Try Google Maps UK

Yesterday I posted a fun”how-to” on creating panoramic images with your cell phone (or regular digital) camera. Last night I decided to try it myself, and using the great utility that came with my Canon Camera (the SD500), I was able to shoot three pics of my desk (shown here) and then stich them together in seconds. It’s not perfect, but for a first try, I was amazed at how the software lined everything up.

For a larger image: Click Here And the weird round thing on the right is a space heater- SF gets cold when the fog rolls in! You can also zoom in and read my desktop and check out my new Samsung 243T flat panel monitor I wrote about here.

You have to try this - it’s really fun. Send me a pic of your desk and we can post them here.