January '99

Guess: Cool workstation, Intel Inside, but not a PC? It's SGI Visual Workstation. After some years of development SGI finally is getting birth to fastest Pentium II workstation ever. The crossbar bus switch (Lithium) combined with IVC Architecture means that graphics memory is yours system memory and vice versa. Why NT? Well, this project was born on those dark days when NT was seen to be the led boot marching on the face... Now this box is targeted by Linux and.. ``Of course it runs NetBSD'' (C). To drink or to browse the Net? This question is raised by Manhattan Scientific, the research firm which designed the prototype of alcohol powered power pack, great for any portable computing device. It's not a steam engine, but the catalyst reaction. The only requirement - don't use it on very bad weather or in non-oxygen atmosphere. So, ``garc,on! - a drink for me and my Mac!''

Lizards come back! (Horror)   The Mozilla nest's children grow up and ready to make a first kick to the fat bottom of old mastodons Internet Explorer and Netscape Communicator. The new browser's design is highly modular, so we may expect a bunch of strong, fast and dangerous lizards (some of them even started to eat each others), but the first one is here - Gecko. This name is the marketing mumbo-jumbo for two great projects - N[ext]G[eneration]Layout and XPToolkit. NGLayout is fastest ever XML layout manager, that turns old Web browser into powerful word processor and spreadsheet. XPToolkit lets write the user interface on XML, without deep programming skills - very nice for people who will migrate from Visual Basic. Check Mozilla.org to see who's growing in eggs.		Stepping on the old rake award. Some days ago, Pepsico, been the second largest soft drinks provider, decided to out-pass Coca Cola. Why not to sell direct to the true end customer? Good idea. Pepsico invested into Pizza Hut, KFC and Taco Bell. Ready do count billions? Very surprising - MacDonalds immediately stopped to sell Pepsi.. What's the hell? Well, to MacDonalds point of view Pepsi transformed from independent soft drink supplier to.. competitor. There is absolutely no reason to trade competitor's goods. So, who stepped at that rake today? Just today, Microsoft announced the alliance with 3Com to embed Windows 2000 (somebody knows what's that?) in a wide range of its products.
			The jubilee of the old award. Tomorrow will be two months after Larry Ellison promised $1 Million to the first person who can demonstrate that MS SQL Server is less than 100 times slower than Oracle database. The query is simple: "How much of last year's revenue was shipped nationally vs. internationally?". The database should be huge. Still nobody won. Larry, somebody told you that's a shame to offend small kids?
Big Brother award. Intel recently announced the integration of unique ID and of hardware random numbers generator into new-coming Pentium III. Yes, a good hacker needs only a week to break the license manager of $300,000 valued Mentor Graphics. Now the software will be unbreakably locked to the CPU. And the purchase is simplified - instead of going to CompUSA you will receive a free CD by mail, install it and get a week to try. Then you may register it online and receive a personal key that you may use only with that computer. If you don't like the software - it will be removed after the trial period. But do you remember this funny bug when Microsoft Office destroys all yours data when you try to deinstall it?
The rumor of the month. The Spring Samsung will sell 533MHz Alphas as little as $250. That's regular 21164, not the next generation 21264 and it is only about the same speed as $2000 Intel Xeon-450. Wanna sub-$1000 Unix workstation?

Copyright by Andrew V. Shuvalov. Back to my home page

$Date: 1999/01/29 02:21:08 $