Real World IT
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Saying goodbye to ZDNet
ZDNet blogs has been my online home since 2004. With the help and a lot of guidance from David Berlind, Stephen Howard-Sarin, and David Grober, I was brought in to the world of blogging and journalism. I enjoyed my work and
all the conversations here and I hope you found it informative [...] -
55W PC power supply powering the dual-core computer
Most computer builders in the world think I’m nuts for endorsing the use of 330 watt power supplies for a high-end performance computer. Conventional “wisdom” says that anything under 500 watts is inadequate for an enthusiast PC. “My power supply is bigger than your power supply” seems to be a typical mindset for many people [...]
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Fixing the unfairness of TCP congestion control
Bob Briscoe (Chief researcher at the BT Network Research Centre) is on a mission to tackle one of the biggest problems facing the Internet. He wants the world to know that TCP (Transmission Control Protocol) congestion control is fundamentally broken and he has a proposal for the IETF to fix the root cause of the [...]
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HDMI survival guide for home theater
There’s a lot of money to be made in the HDMI cabling and switch aftermarket and unfortunately that means a lot of consumers are getting tricked in to paying outrageous prices. I’ve spent quite a bit of time helping my friends set up their home theaters recently and I thought I’d share that knowledge with [...]
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The cheapest way to do VoIP is still analog
What happens when you want to just want a bunch of phones in your business, hotel, or organization and you don’t need a bunch of fancy and complicated features on the phone? It’s simple, just get a bunch of cheap analog phones. But how do you build a phone system to support a bunch of [...]
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Fraunhofer IIS shows audio technology at VON.x 2008
In the world where chip technology improves exponentially, acoustic engineering isn’t so simple and it presents a huge hurdle to overcome to the world of telephony and video conferencing. Fraunhofer IIS (inventors of MPEG-1 Layer 3 AKA MP3) seeks to tackle this challenge and showed off some of its research and upcoming products at VON.x [...]
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Japan's ISPs agree to ban P2P pirates
Four of Japan’s largest Internet provider organizations have come to an agreement with copyright holders on how to tackle the illegal file trading on P2P (Peer to Peer) networks. Comprised of about 1000 major and smaller Japanese Internet providers, the four organizations agreed to target flagrant copyright violators by first warning them and then banning [...]
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AMD Shanghai won't get HyperTransport 3
HyperTransport 3 which was once slated for AMD’s Barcelona server processors seem to be delayed again on Shanghai until some time in 2009 when it finally arrives for the “Montreal” quad- and octal-core CPUs. According to page 21 of Mario Rivas’ slides, the roadmap clearly indicates AMD’s first 45nm processor Shanghai won’t get the newer [...]
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Building the 200 inch 1080p HDTV
Yesterday I helped my friend build his 200 inch 1080p HDTV for his entertainment room and it was a beast of a task. But when it was all said and done, I think he was quite happy. Pictured above and below is me standing in front of the display. [See gallery for larger images.]
In the [...]
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Early photos of AMD Shanghai CPU
Credit: Fuad Abazovic, Fudzilla
Photos of CPU-Z highlighting AMD’s 45nm Shanghai quad-core processor appeared on Fudzilla last week. It confirms that AMD’s latest processor will have a total of 2 megabytes L2 cache (512 KB per core), and 6 megabytes of shared L3 cache.
By contrast, AMD’s 65-nm Barcelona-class processors (Phenom and Opteron quad-core) only have 2 [...] -
Asus' 8.9" Eee draws crowds at CeBIT
Here in CeBIT 2008, crowds descended on Hannover Germany to see the latest technologies. Germany is certainly a lovely country but there’s nothing lovable about the 5.60 Euro per gallon gas prices.
CeBIT is certainly one of the more unique conventions I’ve been to since everything is spread out over a square kilometer and it’s [...] -
AT&T's degrading service and my landlord's ban on Comcast
With all the negative attention headed towards Comcast lately, AT&T’s problems seem to be slipping below the radar. Unfortunately for me, those problems are first hand for me as I’m personally suffering degradations in speed. As if getting 1200 Kbps downstream on a so-called 1500 Kbps service and all those outage problems (example here and [...]
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A geek's trip to Capitol Hill on Network Management
I appeared before congressional and government staffers on Capitol Hill for a panel on Network Management sponsored by iGrowthGlobal. This was my first time in Washington DC and while it was a little cold for my Californian bones, it was a beautiful city and seeing the capitol of the nation was certainly a worthwhile experience. [...]
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Intel christens Silverthorne as "Atom"
Intel has officially announced its new branding for the “Silverthorne” processor and the “Menlow” platform. The Silverthorne processor will be called the “Intel Atom”. The Menlow platform will be called “Intel Centrino Atom”. The Intel Atom processor will be used in the Intel Centrino Atom platform. The new Atom logos are shown below.
Intel released [...]
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Microsoft's free enterprise search is a must try
At the Heroes Happens {here} event in LA yesterday which saw the launch* of Windows Server 2008, one of the relatively hidden gems of the event in my opinion was Microsoft’s free** Search Server 2008 Express. It’s is a streamline install of Office SharePoint Server 2007 with almost all the enterprise search features that most [...]
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FCC hearings: Comcast versus Vuze
The FCC held its hearing on Comcast’s Network Management practices at Harvard University yesterday. Vuze executive Gilles BianRosa whose company filed one of the two FCC complaints against Comcast reportedly told the FCC yesterday that BitTorrent does not hog bandwidth. Since most Internet experts would dispute that claim, I generated the following hard data on the [...]
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Leaked Intel Nehalem performance projections over AMD Shanghai
It appears that the rumors about Intel’s next major microprocessor “Nehalem” being a huge juggernaut may be true according to leaked documents from Sun Microsystems (removed Sunday night). The slides appear to be inadvertently placed on Sun’s publicly accessible website and “jokerman” posted the link on Aceshardware (thanks to tip from ZDNet reader JumpingJack). The [...]
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Why Satellite Internet service is so slow
I was reading in the news today about an experimental geosynchronous communications satellite being launched by Japan and I got to wondering about why Satellite Internet service has such horrendous latency and is so slow. So I drew up a little diagram above (click to see full resolution) and did some calculations on the distance [...]
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One year till death of analog TV in USA
Analog TV will no longer be broadcast one year from today on February 19th 2009, are you ready for the conversion to digital TV? This may or may not affect you so here’s what you need to know to avoid losing TV reception!
The first question to answer is whether this government mandated change to over-the-air [...] -
Cracking open a Toshiba HD-A30 HD DVD player
Updated 3:00AM - By now the news is out that the end of HD DVD might be near since Toshiba is considering its options that may include the possibility of stopped production on HD DVD products is confirmed dead. There are more than a million HD DVD owners, two exclusive HD DVD studios, and the adult [...]
