Tech Tok

I saw this on sale at Wal-Mart last night. Actually, there were several others on sale as well. I couldn’t resist buying one. One day I expect to have a combo HD/Blu-Ray player. But until then I won’t be able to play this disc.

I thought that this would be one of the one-side-HD-the-other-side-DVD discs, but no luck there.

I’ve posted pictures on Flickr of the case, the disc, etc, so enjoy.

Yet another very cool Google Maps API use: tracking satellites in real-time. Click on the pic below to see the full-size screenshot.

The ISS was above the horizon around lunch time today.

I am curious about how it figured out my longitude and latitude. Perhaps by my IP address? Hmm.

(via Wohba)

AMD released their Turlon X2 CPUs, and their spin on this catch-up offering was that they are the “first to market” with a 64-bit mobile CPU.

Ya, like we can really cram in more than 4 GB of RAM on a laptop.

Intel seems to be the one coming out with signifigantly upgraded products this year. To be fair, they are really playing catch-up with AMD. However, in many instances, they are playing catch-up-and-pass.

Meanwhile it seems like AMD is treading water. The whole AM2 chipset thing doesn’t seem to be getting any markket buzz at all. I give kudos to AMD for a relatively stable chipset history though. Intel’s chipsets have required motherboard upgrades a lot more frequently over the last 3 years or so.

At this point, AMD is still the power CPU de jour, but for anything else, the Core Duo brand is taking it all.

And with the Core 2 Duo around the corner, it doesn’t look like that will change any time soon.

Yow! Mark just told me about this 64 GB beauty.

That’s a lot of room in your pocket. Geez, I still remember the really expensive, really loud, HUGE hard disk we bought at Alias to use as The Big File Server. It was all of 300 MB!

Oh, they use 1 GB == 1,000,000,000 bytes, so it’s really a 59.6 GB drive. Shucks.

Iain pointed me to this BFG page when he told me I could buy a PhysX card for my PC. He said it didn’t seem to be available in Canada.

However, if you scroll down the page you will see that they are promoting the following Canadian places to get the BFG PhysX card:

• ASI
• CompuSmart
• Future Shop
• GeniTech
• NCiX
• TigerDirect.ca

TigerDirect’s price is $380, which is a bit steep considering it only costs $300 in the US.

Maybe I should get one before I go. $CDN/$US is currently at 0.9085, so if I buy it here (ignoring costs of converting currency), it would “only” cost $330 or so.

I was somewhat taken aback last night when Iain told me that physics chips for games were no good. He expanded on this by saying that because the data flows over the PCI bus, it slows everything down.

Now, wouldn’t they be PCI-express cards? Hm.

Today I ran across a Slashdot story titled Comparing PC Game Physics, which details how the companies behind the two big physics engines are depating each other’s merits on public forums.

Apparently it started when Havok, the company behind Half-Life 2’s physics engine (I guess it’s a 3rd party library that the Half-Life guys licensed?) commented on Ageia’s PhysX card being used in Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter, which also a Havok game.

Ageia has now shot back a response.

Interesting goings-on..

This XbitLabs article explains how TDK has built a prototype Blu-Ray disc with 6 33(and â…“ no doubt)GB layers.

Wooooo…