René Rebe

So VIA now enters the game of many-core with the VIA Nano QuadCore.

Unfortunately, however, the dual-core VIA Nano X2 did not yet even made it to the market. The VIA Nano already was years late, and so is the X2. I guess this time they may ship the QuadCore sooner, because it mostly consists of two X2 dies, which will probably help to start shipping the X2 and QuadCore in a similar timeframe.

Without all these delays, or slow development –whatever you want to name it– I’m sure VIA would have been more successful over the last years. This way Intel and AMD could get into the lower-power market easily, and quickly. And this while Intel’s Atom is only deliver an “abysmal” year 2004 Transmeta Efficeon performance.

The X2 and QuadCore thermal design power (TDP) is not that low either, 25W for the fastest X2, and 27W for the (lower-clocked) QuadCore + ~5W for the chipset and graphics. AMD’s Fusion E-350 runs at 18W, while the C- and G- series are down to 5W-9W, including the memory controller and graphics: Fusion.

VIA will continue to have a hard time competing against AMD’s high-performance, low-power offerings, as well as Intel’s less-performing either lower-power (Z-series Atom) or higher-power regular Atoms.

PS: What surprises me in Anandtech’s report is, that VIA Centaur is running their simulation cluster with Intel CPUs. I certainly would not feed my competitor, and instead rather use my own CPUs. This would not only thoroughly stress test them, but also motivate the engineers to develop performant next-gen chips, … And: You seriously expect other cloud folks (Facebook, Google, et al.) to run clusters of VIA CPUs if VIA is not even doing so in-house???

Looks like some at Apple are working overtime, and reviewing Apps on Sundays:

May 08, 2011 11:01 In Review
May 08, 2011 14:44 Processing for App Store
May 08, 2011 14:46 Ready for Sale

Who thought Apple’s Mac App review times would have improved since my last (iOS) report, just look at this:

March 28, 2011 08:07 Waiting For Upload
March 28, 2011 08:45 Upload Received
March 28, 2011 08:45 Waiting For Review
March 31, 2011 15:11 In Review
April 05, 2011 22:28 Rejected
April 06, 2011 10:31 In Review
April 07, 2011 08:37 Rejected
April 07, 2011 09:05 Waiting For Upload
April 10, 2011 05:58 Upload Received
April 10, 2011 06:00 Waiting For Review
April 10, 2011 06:15 In Review
April 19, 2011 11:07 Processing for App Store
April 19, 2011 11:10 Ready for Sale

Fun getting an App thru thy all-mighty review guards, heh?

diskutil resizeVolume disk0s3 40G

Life can be so nice!

However, now with Mac OS X 10.7 “Preview 2″ (11A419) my Logitech trackball’s scroll wheel is inverted, … How can a bug like that slip into a solid USB HID stack? Ieek :-(

Update: It’s not a bug, it’s a feature! Preferences -> Mouse -> “Move content in the direction of finger movement when scrolling or navigating” - inverts the mouse wheel, and a-like event’s orientation, … Ieek! Feels so strange, …

My main “workstation”, a 3 year old MacBook Pro, is really reaching the point where something slightly snappier would be nice. As I also use Linux a pretty PC laptop would be sufficed, too. Especially as I do not 100% fall in love with the latest unibody Macs, anyway (I would take a black liquid-metal incarnation, though, … ;-).

With the advent of neat silicon from AMD there should be plenty of slim, light and long battery life PCs, but there aren’t, … :-( The only thing one could barely consider was the previously expensive, and now discontinued Dell Adamo, … With this good design vacuum it is no wonder Apple is selling that well, …

I could consider the new Lenovo X220, the IPS display is certainly appealing, but where the heck is the ultra-portable, slim & light S-series edition of it?

Oh my, guess I have to wait even longer, and if the PC industry continues to fail with good designs, I can just hope to see some nice liquid metal, black & beautiful Apple laptop in a year (or so), …

Again the German Railway took off without us, and it was literally just seconds missing this time! We had like 9 minutes to change the train, and our train was about 5 minutes late. Normally not a problem to still catch the next train; one would think, … But when the DB parks the first train at the second half of the platform behind another, and let you jog it done with all your luggage, to arrive at the net train “just in time”, touch the door sensor, but the ICE just accelerates away, … well, you know that there is something wrong at that public transportation company’s management.

Actually this is not the first time - stuff like this happened to us so often that we rarely used DB railway the last years anyway. Usually flying or rented cars are cheaper anyway. Once we had playing kids on the track, another time environmental activist cut off the electricity line, and worse was a concrete block of said environmental groups. The worst situations ever, however, where when some train had frost damages, the listed replacement went later, but did went into a slightly different direction, and thus did not stop at our destination station and another time when all ticket automats where defect, we where instructed to go down the hall to buy the tickets (not possible in short distance trains, no exceptions, not even when all ticket machines are out of order), and when we arrived back, the next train was already in place, which we mistakenly even entered in all the haste!!!

And this is not even counting in the mess that is the Berliner S-Bahn, nor recent strikes!

We just gave the “Bahn” a chance, because the departure time was more suitable, and we had the luck to get one of those highly discounted tickets.

Guess how often we will use the railway the coming years.

(Posted via 3G, O2 Germany, in before-mentioned ICE.)

Berlin is not only breaking international visitors records year after year, with the Berlinale and similar events it is also attracting movie business and fans.

In time for this year’s Berlinale moviemaker Ralf Schmerberg installed the letters “Holywood” in Berlin Tiergarten, just between Brandenburger Gate and Potsdamer Platz. The installation mimicks the legendary skyline in Los Angeles meassuring 14 meter in height and 53 meter wide.

The creator wants to point out the shrinking number of tree’s in the otherwise green city, apparently due to missing funding in the city’s budgets.

Enjoy even more in my Berlin 2011 gallery.

For some time our office’s Konica Minolta Magicolor 2430dl kept feeding paper worse every week. Sometime one had to multiple clear a virtual “Paper jam in tray 1″ to get a single sheet printer out, … with just 7563 total faces printed on the printer’s internal counters.

It got annoying enough to finally take a look, and apparently it is a known problem! And cleaning the paper pickup rubber roller really helped, for us!

Let’s print on, … :-)

Those who know me, or other fellow readers, may have noticed: I am a little in this low-level computer science stuff, like OS kernel, assembly, ARM, PowerPC, SPARC, and such, …

So my latest pet project, for the weekend education was resurrecting the T2 MIPS port. And as such I had some fun porting dietlibc to MIPS64.

And what a fun ride that was, looking forward to see how MIPS develops on the smart-things side of life!

Sony is suing computer scientist and programmer George Hotz for getting Linux to work on his personal PS3, again - performing an in-depth security analysis of the system on the way and uncovering a bunch of beginner programmer mistakes while at it.

If anyone should have sued anyone in this case, then it should have been the general public in a class action suit against Sony for taking away an formerly advertised “Other OS” feature, a function that allowed the use a real OS, such as Linux, on the “computer system” that is the PS3. A feature taken away by Sony on April the 1st 2010.

If anything, Sony should have silently taken the in-depth security analysis by Hotz and the fail0verflow group and hardened their next gen console, such as an PS4 or PSP2, with the lessons learned form all their sloppy mistakes, such as not using random data for the crypto, … [or for delivering rootkits with their Windows software, …]

I would be all for upgrading my fat PS3 that I intentionally did not update since May 2010 to still be able to boot to my Linux, and thereby save some Euro on my electricity bill due to the more efficient PS3 slim. However, Sony’s customer limiting feature removal does prevent my living room setup from going green, …

Due to Sony’s latest actions, I call to boycott Sony, until they stop suing their customers!

Instead there are plenty of other companies delivering aesthetic, feature rich, and often more affordable consumer electronic products for home entertainment and business computer equipment. Until Sony stops their latest actions against free speech, fair use and the internet I recommend supporting more customer oriented companies. Companies that do not sue their customers for doing whatever they want with the expensive equipment investment.