I Am JohnB

A few days ago, AMD announced the soon to be released HD 6990. It's a dual gpu card, 2GB's of ram per gpu. It's memory bandwidth is rated at 302.7GB/s It sucks down 400W under full load and costs about $700USD. The dual bios switch that AMD introduced with the single gpu 6950/70, on the 6990 it's a switch that allows you to overclock the hard with just a flick of the wrist. AMD now has the performance crown, granted Nvidia is still the champ of single gpu graphics cards. Nvidia has been speaking about their upcoming competing dual gpu graphics card, and I'm not sure Nvidia will be able to wrestle the performance card back.

I say this because eVGA has announced a dual gpu graphics card coined the "GTX460 2Win". http://www.evga.com/articles/00613/ It's two GF114 gpu's with 2GB's of GPU shared between the gpu pair. The memory interface has been upped from 256bit to 512bit for 230.4GB's of memory bandwidth.  I have my doubts that this will take the performance crown back from AMD and their HD 6990. While I don't know if this is a one off from eVGA, of if this is Nvidia's official answer to the HD 6990. If it is the official answer, it won't win outright but where it might win is price for performance. This is where AMD normally rules the day, and it's pretty interesting for Nvidia to play the "AMD role" as I like to call it.

In short, if we find out that the GTX460 2Win is indeed Nvidia's official answer to the HD 6990, Nvidia will have pulled an "AMD", and will give the overall performance crown to AMD, for now. ;)

For the most part most people won't be able to do anything with the alphanumerical string I'm about to bestow apon this blog post, but since Sony is now going after ge0hot's YouTube account for personal details, I thought that I'd take it apon myself to post to this blog the very thing that Sony doesn't want anyone to see. This is the master encryption key for Sony's PS3 courtesy of @Devar.....

 

46 DC EA D3 17 FE 45 D8 09 23 EB 97 E4 95 64 10 D4 CD B2 C2

http://www.redmondpie.com/sony-demands-youtube-reveal-geohot-fail0verflows-personal-details/

It would appear that Sony has graduated from a group of asshats to the highest pinnacle of lord of the house of douchebaggery. How far have thee fallen Sony .. how far have thee.. 

My final word is still ruminating in the back of my grey matter somewhere. I do like the layout, but the video quality is just aweful. Is this really the result of a collaboration between News Corp. and Apple? There is no excuse for crappy video quality in this. Navigation is also a bit of a cludge. There isn't a way to tell the user which way to orient the screen to view a story or pictures. My biggest gripe so far is the lagginess in selecting content to view, it's measureable. However as a first time out, it's not all that bad. There is a large need for improvement. 

On the bright side, you can purchase The Daily from the App Store for free, with the first 2 weeks free sponsored by Verizon Wireless. I'll have more of an opinion as times goes on and I have more time to use the app.

Sony, haven't you learned the lesson as to the damage that rootkits can do? When Sony was using rootkits as part of their anti-piracy tech on audio CD's, it opened a door that did actual hardware damage to PC's. Most of the complaints were non functional optical drives, but where is Sony drawing the line? In a press release, Sony admitted that the rootkit allows for remote code execution. This is most likely how they intend to ban PS3's that are jailbroken (which is a lawful process to do to electronics you own bee tee dubs) there is no telling what else will happen. This is simply nothing more of a repeat of their previous DRM debacle. I was giving serious thought to buying a PS3, but not now. 

Sony is trying to punish it's users for doing what we're allowed to do under the law. (even though there shouldn't be any law on the books anywhere regarding this) Every interested person knows about the Library of Congress ruling that jailbreaking isn't illegal under the DMCA. So Sony turns right around, sues the people that are responsible for releasing the encryption key, which by the way, IS THE EXACT SAME KEY FOR EVERY PS3 EVER MADE!! (i.e - the keys aren't psuedo-random) Sony has always been lax and lazy when it comes to encrypting anything and now their throwing their hammers around trying to cover this up. All it's doing is drawing more attention to the nacent PS3 homebrew scene and making it more obvious how easy it is with the right tools. Of course, Sony is claiming this can circumvent copy protection (which is implemented very poorly in the PS3) and be used to play pirated PS3 games. Yeah maybe, but that's not the arguement to be made here. Sony doesn't want you to do what you want with your property, plain and simple. 

All Sony should be doing is saying something along the lines of, "You want to jailbreak your PS3 that's fine with us, just don't expect support or online multiplayer if you do!" End. They're putting their own product that you ponied up your hard earned money for on the line for malware damage. I for one don't trust anyone to have the capability to put their sticky malformed fingers in any electronics I own. The rush Sony is putting on getting all PS3 jailbreak info off the internet is absolutely laughable. The genie is out of the bottle Sony, you're an hour short and a day late.

For more info on PS3 jailbreaking and software .. https://github.com/psgroove/psgroove

According to this article on the Chromium blog, Google is removing H.264 support from their Chrome browser in a future release. This is a very bad idea for more then several reasons....

1. It's been widely known for months that MPEG-LA will not force licensing fees for H.264 codec use ever, as long as the codec is freely distributed.

2. H.264 has become, for the most part, the de facto standard for use with the HTML5 video tag.

3. WebM/VP8 still needs a lot of work, and this is an admission by Google that WebM/VP8 is ready for prime time, and it's not.

4. This move by Google will only serve to make the full transition to HTML5 even more messy. Instead of having "one browser to rule them all", this will force web developers to format content for Google Chrome and then for the rest of the web, i.e, browsers that still support H.264.

I could go on and on, but I think it's suffice to say that Google really isn't worried about HTML5 as it is pushing it's own codec and forcing web developers to make a choice that effects everyone that uses the Internet. I also don't understand why people as late as December of 2010, are still complaining about H.264 royalties. MPEG-LA has stated that as long as their codec is freely distributed, you won't have anything to worry about. So if you want to use your point and shoot camera or something more pro-sumer like a Canon 5D MkII, then doing that won't hit you in the pocketbook.

I've been a fan of Google Chrome for a long time now, and this is starting me to rethink what browser I'll be using going forward.

These are pictures of my Dad's Christmas decorations from one year ago today.

PhotoFast makes SSD replacements for the new MacBook Air, and today Apple asked PhotoFast to cease production of said SSD units. Why you ask? It's not because Apple doesn't use SSD's in the new MacBook Air, they do, it's because the Toshiba SSD controller that PhotoFast is using is faster then the controller Apple is using in their own SSD that ship with a new MacBook Air. I'm starting to think Apple doesn't really care about their market share in order to get away with what is otherwise anti-competitive behavior and I'm really starting to be disgusted by the corporate behavior at Cupertino.

I have no problem with Apple controlling their own ecosystem, but why does every single time Apple tries to stop a company from making and/or releasing a "work-with" product, the end result always reduces consumer's choice? Is that what Apple is really about these days? Why didn't Apple choose to go with a faster controller in the first place? The answer to that could be price controls, however that doesn't make any sense either when you take Apple's premium pricing scheme into consideration. They're already making massive profits per MacBook Air sold. They also could own patents on their SSD design, but the catch there is companies have been making SSD's of a similar design for years. We all know how patents work.

While this isn't putting Apple at any type of risk, there is always more to consider. There are jobs related to SSD production. While SSD's are made completely by machine, people are relied apon to inspect units before they're shipped. I used to do this type of inspection work for a living so I know myself. I just thought of this, there could be problems with Apple's EFI firmware and an SSD with a faster controller such as the one from Toshiba. This isn't a call for alarm. I'm not claiming to have any insider knowledge on this, just think this is a possibility or explanation for Apple's recent actions.