A Leslie Wong Blog

oboy, over at Digg writes, “FiOS, you ain’t got nothing on this: Alcatel-Lucent researchers in France have successfully transmitted optical data at an absolutely blazing speed of 16.4 Tbps over a distance of over 1,500 miles.“

read more | digg story

(Fiber optic photo courtesy of [luis]‘s)

Wolfgang Gruener, over at Tom’s Hardware, noted that Intel released a Product Change Notification (PDF) that they are discontinuing production of nine Intel® Core™2 Duo processors and Intel® Core™2 Duo processors LV, code-named Merom.

It seemed like I was just writing in anticipation about Merom and Santa Rosa but that was actually back in September, 2006, when I was contemplating the purchase of a Merom laptop. I bought a MacBook “Late 2006 Core 2 Duo,” which lacked that “Santa Rosa” Centrino chipset but the T7200 processor does have a 4MB L2 cache. The current Macbooks (late 2007), use the 2.0GHz or 2.2GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor with an 800MHz FSB, and the Santa Rosa chipset with the Intel GMA X3100 GPU.

My Macbook still doesn’t feel slow yet, even though the 1 year warranty expired last November. I somehow doubt that’s a testimony to Vista or Leopard, though.

nalts over at YouTube writes:

“Has Apple considered the implications of its glorification of thin models? Has it once considered the feelings of my “big boned” HP, and how she’s felt living in a society where you’re only as attractive as you are THIN? And what about the young processors that are at an impressionable age. Do they need this pressure? I think not.”

We signed up the first day the OLPC Give One, Get One program started, so today, someone delivered our OLPC XO laptop.

Hopefully, some fortunate kid on the other end is in posession of the one we gave.

There were only two sheets of paper and three components in the box: the laptop, the battery and AC adapter. I was able to connect the battery but I was stumped on how to open the XO laptop.

Everything is iconic with this computer, so it took me awhile to figure out the illustration – extend the WIFI antennas then unfold the screen. I kept thinking the hinge was a latch.

Now I’ve worked on it for 6 hours trying to get the XO Wifi to work with my Linksys WRT-54G v2 router. I’m using WPA-PSK TKIP, reduced the WPA Shared Key from 24 characters to 8, tried manually configuring the network, installed the official signed build 653, rolled back to build 650, all to no avail.

I’ve tried this, this , this and this, turned off wireless encryption on the router to see if I could connect (I did) – and now I’m slightly frustrated, especially since other people seem to be able to have some success with WPA encryption and the XO.

Wired has a photo gallery,”Looking Back at 25 Years of the C64, the Ultimate ’80s Computer”

My first computer, the Commodore VIC-20, was actually the precursor to the Commodore 64. I remember rushing out to buy the $(US) 299 VIC-20 from a computer store on Lexington Avenue in the 50′s.

The VIC-20 I bought came with 5K RAM and a tape cassette storage device. It was marketed for games that were sold on ROM plug in cartridges, but there was a word processing application and a 300 baud modem. I later upgraded the RAM to a total of 8K and bought the 5.25″floppy disk drive.

I think I used the VIC-20 with Citibank’s first online banking service, “Direct Access” (or was the first iteration called Home Base?). Kim Moser has put up a few photos of Citibank’s Direct Access brochures. The main thing I remember about it was that at 300 baud (Citibank gave me the modem), I could pretty much read the data that was coming up on the screen as it scrolled. When modems got up to 2400 baud, I couldn’t keep up. A Compuserve and Prodigy membership followed shortly after that.

I passed the VIC-20 on to my mother, when Kenny, (who gave me a lot of stuff) gave me an Apple II+, which I still have. That was the start of my downward experience with computers.

VIC-20 Photo courtesy of cbmeeks and Wikipedia, C64 photo courtesy of Commodore

When I first read about ClubIT’s $59.99 (USD) gOS Developer Kit, I started thinking about applications where I could use it. How can you pass up a $60 ‘puter?

The Via pc2500 motherboard is relatively small – it conforms to the FlexATX form factor which is 9.0 in. x 7.5 in. (221 mm x 191 mm). I first thought the Via board would be a good starting point for a car computer. With a small touchscreen LCD, I could use it for a GPS and an A/V source for music (and video).

As I started looking for cases, there seemed to be a dearth of cases for the FlexATX motherboard. Most FlexATX cases also fit the larger microATX motherboard. (FlexATX is an addendum to the microATX specification). I may have confused the ATX motherboard sizes with the ITX form factor developed by Via Technology.

The ITX form factors are much smaller than the ATX specs:

I was unable to find a small FlexATX enclosure that might fit under the seat of a car or inconspicuously in the trunk. Instead I found a Silverstone SST-LC11S-300 for $27.51 (USD) on eBay. For a motherboard that has a maximum power draw of 20 watts, this case is a little overkill. But until I find a suitable enclosure, I have another HTPC.

As for the OS, I tried installing the gOS and received an error, /sbin/modprobe “abnormal exit.” I found several reported bugs in Ubuntu that described the same error that required a kernal fix . Instead, I installed an OEM version of Vista, and have the PC headless at the moment.

(3 December 2007) Doing more research on the abnormal exit during the install of gOS and Ubuntu 7.04 led me to add the boot parameter all_generic_ide after hitting F6 on the boot screen. This problem is discussed in the Ubuntu Forums.

If you have a cell phone (of which I do not), you should try this:

The gOS, an Ubuntu-based Linux distribution that is used on the recently released Everex PC, has exploded into popularity. The $199 Everex TC2502, is sold out at Wal-Mart.ClubIT has a $59.99 gOS Developer Kit based on the VIA C7-D processor and the Via PC-2500 motherboard. This is the same processor and motherboard that is used in the Everex TC2502.

Via’s main selling point for this processor and chipset is its Carbon Free Computing Initiative. Via has introduced a new benchmark called the TreeMark Tree Rating.Via emphasizes the lower amounts of carbon dioxide (CO2) created in generating the electricity used in computing with the VIA C7-D processor compared to other computing platforms.

read more | digg story

I ordered OS X 10.5 (Leopard) from Amazon.com and it was delivered today. I didn’t buy the boxed retail version of OS X 10.4 (Tiger) because it came installed on my Macintrash, but I did buy the retail version of Panther for my my other Macintrash, a Powerbook. When I opened the box from Amazon, the first thing I noticed was how much smaller Leopard is than Panther.