By George Ou on
6/30/2009 1:09 AM
$18 (after $20 rebate) NVIDIA 8600GT graphics card with dual DVI
http://www.newegg.com/Special/ShellShocker.aspx
I don't think this blog entry requires much explanation. Even without the rebate, it's a great deal. You can order up to 3 of these and get a maximum of $60 rebate. For anyone with an older graphics card, this will breath new life into the computer with a reasonably fast, quiet, and cool temperature graphics card.
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By George Ou on
6/29/2009 2:51 AM
23" LCDs are getting real cheap, but holding weird resolutions. I thought it was odd when they started doing 1920x1080 rather than 1920x1200, but take this Samsung 23" for $200 with an odd ball 16:9 resolution of 2048x1152.
While that extra resolution may be welcome for productivity work, it is suboptimal for 1080p video content. A lot of games won't support that resolution either.
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By George Ou on
6/14/2009 10:20 PM
Update 6-22-2009 - Looks like Google stopped hard drive caching on their 720P content. Ironically, that's the content that needs the caching the most but I guess they want to keep people from snagging the 720P clips.
With skyrocketing bandwidth costs due to 640 Kbps "HQ" video and 2.25 Mbps 720P "HD" video, Google is getting a massive bandwidth bill every day to deliver all those YouTube videos. To alleviate their bandwidth load (and your's), they now cache all the video content on your hard drive. Not only does this perform better, but it also makes it easier to snag c
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By George Ou on
6/6/2009 5:06 PM
Just got my hands on an Asus Eee PC 1008HA clamshell yesterday afternoon. So far, this thing is very much impressing me with its form factor. The 1008HA looks like a miniature MacBook Air at 1.1 kilogram (2.4 pounds) and no more than 1 inch thick. There are no breaks in the contour of the chassis and the unit looks very nice. I put the unit in my wife's purse and it barely feels like there's a netbook inside. The ladies will definitely care for the pink, red, blue, or white 1008HA.
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By George Ou on
5/13/2009 6:43 AM
As I've previously explained, an Intel G45 motherboard and Intel Conroe-L "Celeron" processor makes the ideal computer system as oppose to an NVIDIA Ion system. Now I'll give you the full configuration list of parts for building a great HTPC system for under $600.
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By George Ou on
5/13/2009 6:40 AM
TechReport just reviewed one of the first mini-ITX NVIDIA Ion platform solutions from Zotac which involves an NVIDIA 9300 graphics adapter and Intel Atom 330 1.6 GHz dual-core CPU. The problem is that its MSRP is priced at $179 and at that price, one can buy a far better integrated graphics Intel G45 motherboard and Intel Conroe-L 1.8 GHz CPU for less money.
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By George Ou on
5/5/2009 11:05 PM
F-Secure is getting some news coverage because one of their bloggers claim that they have identified a security failure in Windows 7 Release Candidate. Their blogger Mikko writes that Windows 7 still hides file extensions which allows virus writers to easily trick users in to launching executable files that were disguised as ordinary
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By George Ou on
4/29/2009 4:30 AM
For anyone who has more than one computer running Office 2007 or if you may need to run the update on a future reinstall, I would suggest that you download the Office 2007 SP2 update here rather than use Windows Update. That's because the file is just shy of 300 MB and it's a big hassle to have to download the file more than once.
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By George Ou on
4/21/2009 4:14 AM
It appears to be a happy ending for Sun Microsystems after all. Not only did they get avoid being abandoned and ravaged by the market like Yahoo, they even got a slightly higher bid with a better matching company. Oracle and Sun were always joined at the hip when it came to Java and Middleware and Oracle database and SPARC/Solaris. The vast majority of Oracle database administrator I knew consider SPARC/Solaris the only serious Oracle platform in the world (though I don't personally agree with this viewpoint).
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By George Ou on
4/20/2009 3:57 AM
Ms. Maureen Callahan at the New York post seems to have struck a nerve and become somewhat of a villainess for her article "Fairytale Ending: Why is no one suspicious of Simon Cowell's latest creation?" criticizing the Suzan Boyle YouTube phenomenon. Someone should have pulled Maureen aside and whispered to her that writing this article is tantamount to standing up in a WWE wrestling event and shouting "IT'S FAKE!"
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By George Ou on
4/7/2009 10:34 PM
I've previously called the Asus 1000HE netbook one of the best values in the netbook market in terms of bang per buck but I had to try it out myself to see if it actually lives up to my expectations. I've now had the opportunity to live with the Asus 1000HE for about a month and I've performed a good deal of testing on it to see how it performs in common tasks that one would expect a netbook to perform.
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By George Ou on
3/30/2009 3:54 AM
I travel quite a bit these days because of my job, and I have been noticing more and more than I can get AT&T hotspot service at places like Starbucks or many airports and some hotels. In the past, one would have to pay $20 per month for T-Mobile hotspot services or cough up $10 or more per day for Wi-Fi access. Now if you're an AT&T DSL customer, you get this service for free which is really convenient. Even if you have 2G or 3G data service, you will still want to use the much lower latency Wi-Fi access when it is available.
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By George Ou on
3/20/2009 11:30 PM
It appears that YouTube is using Silverlight instead of Flash video for March Madness. That's awesome news for netbook owners and lower end computers because Silverlight is so much more CPU friendly than Flash video. Now if YouTube will convert the rest of the site over, at least for all of the 720P content, that would make the site so much more friendly because flash 720P simply chokes on lower end computers such as netbooks.
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By George Ou on
3/15/2009 2:56 AM
The folks at breakitdownblog.com have accused Netflix of deliberately throttling their users to 480 Kbps (60 KB/sec). Their proof? Downloading a video stream using 10 TCP flows is 10 times faster than downloading videos using the normal single flow. The blogger at breakitdownblog.com concludes that this must mean Netflix is intentionally throttling their users because they assume that there must be extra available bandwidth that Netflix is keeping from their customers. Well I hate to break the news to breakitdownblog.com, but this is normal congestion behavior.
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By George Ou on
3/12/2009 8:54 PM
This is a good test for a netbook to run to show that 720P Silverlight works on a slow netbook while flash 720p will not.
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