Analog-Theater 2.0

So, how is everyone doing?  It has been awhile since I put anything up here, so, I figured I had better do so, or I might as well give my little brother the keys and sign over the domain.

But, like wow, hasn’t a lot happened since my last post…I mean, where do I start?

Well, we can start with what I know.  I am now King of the Lab at my day job, as opposed to the former incumbent who called himself the “Queen of the Lab” and who wanted to be the Queen of Summertime as well.  Currently we all hope he is now getting to know Bubba really well.  On a side note, it would appear that being King of the Lab means a lot more work, a lot of the same work, and only $0.10 an hour more then your underlings who have a lot less to worry over.  But hey, I now have Awesome powers according to boss.

On the technology front, we have Intel releasing the Core I7 architecture this week, and they will finally have all the same features as AMD.  Of course they where already faster, so this is more of a nail in the coffin release.  Speaking of AMD, we should see the release of Bobcat this week or next.  Bobcat is an 8 watt processor designed to take on the Intel Atom.  Atom for those of you who don’t know is the 4 watt processor which is used in most of the new Netbooks you are going to be seeing pop up everywhere.  I am currently typing this on my Aspire One, and believe me it isn’t easy.    It would probably help is I wasn’t on an excersize bike at the same time.

Now, you are all thinking 4watts is clearly better then 8, and you are wrong.  What?  I know, I know, math right.  Well the thing is that the Bobcat will be a classic AMD processor and have a lot of toys on the chip that Intel puts on the motherboard, and that means those toys (onboard memory controler, etc…) have to counted as part of the processor when reporting power consumption.

What I really want to see them drop though is Deneb, the new quadcore processor due out this quarter.  Currently I have an Athlon X2 6000+, which is only a dual core, but is still a lot faster then most quad for what I do.

In operating system news, we can be happy that Microsoft is trying to fix the mistake they made when they released Vista at us, and will be dropping Windows 7 in the next year or so.  It will be based on Vista, but should tighten up a lot of the problems.  OpenSuSE 11.1 will be upon us shortly, and I look forward to that, I’ve been using 11 for awhile now and have been very happy.  Ubuntu has gone 8.10 and as I am using that right now, I can’t say much bad about it.  I tried it on my play machine in the office and couldn’t figure out how to fix the screen resolution as even the fancy .conf file I wanted to edit, no longer managed the settings.  I am using KDE 4.1.2for those who are even remotly interested.   I will post a fancy screen shot later.

Apple has also released a bunch of fancy new MacBook and MacBook Pro laptops which look interesting, but all have nasty reflective glossy screens that ruin them for much real use.  But for the bargain hunters out there, last generation MacBooks can now be had for around $850 + tax.  Also, for those of you with Netflix, the online movie viewer, now functions in both Firefox and Safari.

Now, we have gotten all that out of the way, how about that economy!  600 point drop in three days, who is in charge of this mess and why are all these idiots selling their stock?  Prices in the toilet means you don’t sell because you will take a bath in excriment.  AIG wants $150 Billion of your dollarsto fund further vactions for their executive staff, who are only footing $20 to $30,000 of the $500,000 retreats.  They need these trips to inform their sales folk of what to sell. If they are $150 Billion in the whole, sales folk don’t need executive retreats, they need to be fired or worse.

Ford, GM, and the other one all want money too, largely because they thought that selling SUV’s while gas continued to get more expensive was a good idea.  I say bail them out, but ensure all the upper management are barred from ever running a company again.  But then I think that about all the companies the goverment bails out.  Charge them criminal neglegance and then if they have a felony, which they should, they are no longer allowed to run a public company.  Problem solved.

Politics I will save so I have something real to talk with everyone about later.

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