A lot of new product announcements have been made in the past month. Kodak has announced a new $4000 13.8 megapixel camera and a $12,000 16 megapixel camera. Maxtor announced that they will producing a 320 GB ATA drives, and Creative Labs annouced the Audigy2.

I’m updating again from the Apple Store in the Mall of America in Minneapolis. This box running OS X 10.2 is a dual 1.25 GHz G4 with a 23″ cinema display. I just ran the ‘openssl speed’ benchmark, and this box managed to get 5045 verify / s for rsa 512.

Sorry for the lack of updates this week. I’ve been rather busy while in Austin, Texas. This is the first time that I’ve managed to make it down to Texas. I visited 6th street on Wednesday night, I got to eat at some unique places like the Iron Cactus, Trudy’s Northstar, and, of course, Rudy’s where they sell you barbequed meat by the pound. I’ll be headed back to the blustery north on Saturday morning, and then moving to Austin permanently in the beginning of October.

The newest version of trillian was released last week. I’m now using it at home and in the office. Trillian is an unbelievable good freeware instant messaging client. One criticism, it doesn’t support IBM Sametime or the project athena zephyr protocols which requires me to have to run two more pieces of instant messaging software.

Kudos to the newest version, the online indicators have been homogenized into colored circles, and I don’t disconnect from yahoo! every five minutes.

What do you do when you have a 2.5 GHz Pentium 4, some liquid nitrogen, dry ice, and a Radeon 9700? Holicho shows you how to do some manly overclocking. He managed to oc his R300 and P4 to new heights achieving an incredible 21504 3DMarks.

At IDF this week, Intel showed a 0.13 micron vapor-phase cooled Pentium4 topping-out at around 4.6 GHz. Holicho got up to around 4 GHz using some extreme (and dangerous) cooling techniques with an older P4. It’s impressive to see the P4 scale as well as it has.

The next big performance increment will be when PC1200 and PC1333 memory are used in conjunction with 0.09 micron P4s. The current i850e boards will work with PC1200, however, PC1333-support hasn’t been mentioned. It has been rumored that the SiS 658 chipset will support PC1333 which will provide and incredible amount of bandwidth to the P4. It will probably be early 2004 by the time this equipment hits the streets.

I saw this comment from Neil Swartz off of a back-up tape restore of cmu-750x from September 16, 1982.

There is a lit candle in an elevator mounted on a bracket attached to the middle of one wall (say, 2″ from the wall). A drop of mercury is on the floor. The cable snaps and the elevator falls. What happens to the candle and the mercury?

The answer is that the candle goes out due to lack of oxygen. (There are no longer any convection currents to keep feeding it) The mercury forms into an ellipsoid due to surface tension. In balling up it exerts a force on the floor which sends it towards the ceiling. It will bounce back and forth between ceiling and floor until the elevator hits the ground. All of this neglects the friction on the guide rails, vibrations, etc.

There’s some pics circulating around of the engineering samples of the clawhammer chip running at 3.5 GHz or in AMD-speak, 5200+. They can be found here, and here.

I find this rather hard to believe, but I’m seeing some people browsing involution.com with “CPM” as their operating system. I would guess that this is someone fooling around with the Mozilla source, but the humor is appeciated.

Some punter managed to tweak a 3.6 GHz P4 system up to 20009
3DMarks using an R300. I’d personally like to see the crazy Japanese “overclocking with liquid nitrogen” crowd get a hold of some 600 MHz engineering samples of Samsung RDRAM and an R300 to get some serious benchmarks.

I’ve been working on some involution.com backend code where I can update by using a local apache server via https as I’m trying to be a bit more careful about how passwords are getting sent over the network.