FastEddie Blogs!

Saw an article a few days ago lamenting the delays on certain Dell products.

Shipping “Dell-ays”

It seems to concentrate mostly on delays of Dell’s newest laptop the XPS M1330.  I find it surprising that they don’t even consider that perhaps there are delays on that laptop because it’s so popular?  I mean, from most reviews, the praises can’t come in any higher.  My favorite blogger even bought one.

So…  why complain?  I mean, sure, Dell can’t keep up with demand, but it’s because they actually did something right for once!  Shouldn’t they at least get credit for that?  They came out with a “sub”-notebook with a dedicated video card when the rest of the competition was satisfied with the standard Intel junk.  They further beefed it up with all sorts of bells and whistles that you don’t see unless you get yourself a 17″ lap warmer.

It reminds me of my hunt for a Prius.  No Toyota dealer had them in stock.  There were waiting lists.  There were price gouges.  Everyone wanted one!  What can Toyota do?  They can increase production, but that takes time.  Doesn’t solve the immediate problem.   Irony is, it seems like they over produced because you see ads for Prius’s all the time now, with all sorts of incentives.  Prediction:  You’ll see the same thing for M1330’s in six months.

http://www.xkcd.com/303/

We were just talking about this.. while our code was compiling…   oh I mean, during lunch.

What a cool idea for a contest prize.  Win Every Wing Commander Game for Every Platform.  And this includes the consoles that the games ran on!

I like how they included a Gateway Pentium 1 to run the Dos & Windows games because a new PC would probably have some incompatibility problems.  Of course they could probably include a VMWare image with everything installed on that… 

Owning a nice little piece of history like that would be neat.

Anandtech has an article with some benchmarks from HD video decoding.  Interesting to note that the nVidia 8600 is faster with HD video than the 8800 because of a dedicated decoding chip.

HD Video Decode Quality and Performance Summer ‘07

WoW is such a time sink.  It sucks you in, and you don’t realize where the time went.  It not only takes away from your normal life, but it also takes away from your normal game playing time as well.  It ends up being the only game you play.

We were talking about good PC games to play, so I was thinking which games I’d be playing right now rather than playing WoW:

- Age of Empires 3
- Black and White 2
- Battlefield 2
- Civilization 4
- Dungeon Siege 2
- FEAR
- Half-Life 2: Episode 1
- Lego Star Wars 2
- Oblivion
- The Movies

Here’s a teaser movie on the set of filming the next Indiana Jones movie

Indy Arrives 

I had my doubts whether Harrison Ford could pull it off again.  But he looks pretty good for an old man!  Must be a lot of makeup…

Was trying to maximize my gigabit ethernet today and wanted a simple utility for measuring bandwidth. Searched and searched until I remembered reading about it in Coding Horror a while back. Making a note of it now so I don’t forget:

Gigabit Ethernet and Back of the Envelope Calculations

Also, since disk speed is a big factor with network throughput, I’m linking this as well, cuz I refer to it very often:

Choosing Anti-Anti-Virus Software

Here’s some funny magazine covers from way back when working with computers was cool.

Top 10 Silliest Computer Mag Covers in History

The only ones in this list that I remember reading were Byte and Boardwatch.  The others were just too cool for me.

I didn’t think they’d actually send me a T-shirt, but they did, so I had to fufill my end of the bargain.  I really enjoy reading Eric Sink’s blog, so I don’t mind too much.

Reading articles like Jeff Atwood’s Choosing Anti-Anti-Virus Software really concern me.  The hard drive is slowest main piece in the computer, and it is made so much slower by installing Antivirus and Antispyware.  It’s shocking how much slower they make your computer.

Now, I’m not so bold as to run my systems naked.  I’ve been bit hard just recently.  But I was wondering if things could be made simpler.

If I’m running non-admin, it’s feasible that the antivirus software could ignore many of the viruses it currently scans for.  My current antivirus program says that it’s currently scanning over 70,000 viruses.  And this is every time I open an executable!  I’m willing to bet a large percentage of those viruses can only be effective if the user is running as admin.  For example, overwriting a .dll in the windows directory, or making changes to HKLM.

What if there was a non-admin setting in the antivirus software that ignored these viruses that requires admin?  How much of a speed-up do you think there would be?

I mean, that’s the ideal situation right?  Reducing the number of risks, until there are zero, and we don’t need antivirus software anymore!   (I’m sure that plays right into Symantec’s business strategy…)