iZ3D has been shipping 19″ and 22″ 3D monitors for a while now mainly aimed at gamers.  How the 3D monitor technology works is better explained here.  The manufacturer has announcedprice cuts for their bottom line models but there’s quite a few glitches that will score negative points and chase away potential customers.  First and foremost, in order to get the iZ3D to work properly you must install the S-3D drivers which are compatible with all major ATI & Nvidia graphics cards.  But there are currently no 64-bit drivers so anyone using a 64-bit operating system is SOL.  Additionally, for you more hardcore gamers, these LCD’s will not work in SLI or Crossfire configurations.  If you use an Nvidia card, forget about using more than one monitor.  The 22″ iZ3D model had a $1,000 price tag but it has dropped down to $599.  Will this help this technology take off?  Personally, I think they should start making these for console(360, PS3, Wii) units.  Gamers are moving away from PC’s over to the console arena anyways so they’ll have better market share.

The battle between CPU and GPU rages on.  According to this article over at The Inquirer, the VP of Sales over at Nvidia has stated the CPU is dead.  He states numerous references from this TG Daily articlein his argument that Intel and AMD are crapping in their pants because CPU technologies are a dying breed.
Here’s what he had to say:

“I don’t know how much this will mean to you all but for those that don’t know a war has just started that will likely be written about for years and which will affect everyone who owns a PC. Everyone.

Basically the CPU is dead. Yes, that processor you see advertised everywhere from Intel. Its run out of steam.The fact is that it no longer makes anything run faster. You don’t need a fast one anymore. This is why AMD is in trouble and its why Intel are panicking. They are panicking so much that they have started attacking us. This is because you do still [need] one chip to get faster and faster – the GPU. That GeForce chip. Yes honestly. No I am not making this up. You are my friends and so I am not selling you. This shit is just interesting as hell.

Today your PC plays video (its our chip that makes that work), you play games (its our chip that makes that work), you rip movies (yup our chip again) – you get the picture?”

Although Roy does have a point, the video card takes on a lot of multimedia tasks, but the CPU is needed to execute and run these processes.  Unless Nvidia has something up their sleeve where a next generation GPU can also take on these tasks, these accusations and rants are null.

Nasa’s Ames Research Center has got into bed with m2mi to experiment with a new satellite network system.   According to a NASA press release, NASA and m2mi will work together to build a network of “nanosats” on a commercial basis.  These nanosat’s will be low orbit satellitesweighing between 11-110lbs and will be arranged in a cluster or constellation pattern.  They will provide a global, space-based, high-speed network for voice, data, storage applications, and Earth observations.  Being that they so small, they can be mass produced at reasonable prices and since they will be so close together(space wise), if one fails then the network will not suffer.  Could this be the future of the Internet?  The Reg reports.

Apparently Research In Motion (RIM) has delayed the launch of the 3G capable BlackBerry 8900 so it doesn’t run along side the launch of the next-generation iPhone.  The Reg reports this isn’t the only reason why it has been delayed.  Reports say that the company’s internal staff has complained about the products technical glitches and will delay its release from this June to August.  The BlackBerry 8900 is supposed to be the first 3G BlackBerry to appear on the AT&T network here in the United States.  Is delaying it past the iPhone’s release date a good idea?  Time will tell.

Microsoft’s Q1 2008 earnings report came out and saw a 24% drop in sales versus this time last year.  The culprit: Windows sales have shriveled up.  It’s no surprise with this lackluster economy and poor consumer acceptance of the new(er) operating system Windows Vista.  There’s still a big consumer fan-base for Windows XP that refuse to switch over.  Now, with XP Service Pack 3 just days away from official release(April 29th), all the reason for XP users to not even bother with Vista at all.  Quite possibly wait it out until the Windows 7 release in 2010.

On a lighter note, Microsoft Office is still doing fairly well, but has suffered a bit with the continued roll out of online applications such as Google Apps.  Additionally, the entertainment division(Zune & Xbox), is up 68%.  The bottom line for Microsoft’s total income is down 11% from the previous year.  Microsoft has its work cut out for them.  The market is shifting and they must change with it to survive.

A non existent gap that is.  These tri-core processors mainly exist for the AMD quad core processors that have a failed core off the assembly line.  They disable the failed core and re-badge it with a tri-core model.  AMD did not create these processors to be different, it was done to reduce expenses.  Instead of the failed processors being trashed and getting $0 for them, they disable the failed component and re-badge it to make up the difference.  Not bad in terms of a business strategy but the PC community begs to differ.  Looking at the benchmarks over at Toms Hardware that compares the AMD Phenom X3 8750 to a similarly priced Intel Core 2 Duo E6550, it doesn’t do all that well except in some multi-threaded applications.  Even with some of those the performance looks grim.

The quad core AMD Phenom counterparts can’t keep up with Intel’s latest quad core’s which is a serious drawback in this cutthroat industry.  If AMD can revamp these processors(later revision) and tune the performance for a Q2 release then maybe we can have some serious competition for Intel.  In the mean time, AMD’s only defense for market share is to cut their prices dramatically compared to Intel’s CPU’s.  These new processors from AMD kind of remind me of the 5 cylinder engines from Volvo, they took a different engineering approach.  But in Volvo’s case they don’t have to considerably reduce the price to compete with other manufacturer’s V6 models.

If enough customers complain about the end-of-life cycle on June 30th.  Steve Ballmer announced at a news conference in Belguim today, “XP will hit an end-of-life. We have announced one. If customer feedback varies we can always wake up smarter but right now we have a plan for end-of-life for new XP shipments”.  Of course he also announced that Windows Vista sales are pumping right along and that customers are transitioning over slowly.  Consumers are still buying PC’s preloaded with Windows XP but that trend will soon stop as of June 30th as OEM’s will no longer be able to get new XP licenses.  If enough customers complain, this date could be extended further.  Windows XP Service Pack 3 has been released which may convince current XP users to stay longer and even hold out until Windows 7 is released in 2009 or 2010.  If that’s the case then the backlash from the consumer community may burst soon.  The Reg reports.

DRM, or Digital Retardated Management as I like to call it, has just brewed a lot of angry customers because of Microsoft.  All music that was purchased from Microsoft’s Music site is now worthless.  Microsoft has announced that since they cannot be bothered to live up to their end of the deal, they will eliminate the DRM licensing servers for music that was purchased.  This move is mainly because they will shift their focus towards the Zune’s DRM technology which is substantially different and more profitable for them.  All the music that was purchased and authorized for download can only be played on that one PC.  As long as that PC doesn’t crash you can play it as long as you want!  Which, if it’s running a Microsoft operating system, should be about 6 months.  DRM has become the new digital virus for the 21st century.  Purposely infected by corporations to help increase profits but at the cost of pissing off customers.  Welcome to the new Web 2.5.

Microsoft’s CEO Steve Ballmer announced late yesterday that they may turn their back on the Yahoo deal.  But is this a good decision to make this late in the game?  Think about it.  Ever since Microsoft started dropping hint bombs about their offer on Yahoo, it has made their management go into overdrive.  Struggling to the best of their ability they have revamped their services and bottom line.  Yahoo did something that no one thought they would do.  They actually got into bed with Google with a “trial” advertisement campaign to see if they could increase their value to stem Microsoft off.  At this point, Microsoft has woken the beast within and clearly Yahoo has shown they will not go down without a fight.  If Microsoft backs off, Yahoo is now stronger and possesses better leadership than it has in the past few years.  And Microsoft has brought this on themselves!  Either they follow through with it or Yahoo may very well continue to be a top contender along side Google.  Who knows, with this recent vigor, Yahoo may dump additional money into R&D and surpass Google one day all because of Microsoft.

Toshiba has announced they will be planning to ship 512GB solid state drives by 2009.  Toshiba currently is preparing to ship 128GB solid state drives to the market by June of this year.  The news of course belittle’s Samsung’s announcement of 256GB SSD’s by 2009.  This is great news and everything but unless they pull a rabbit out of their hat(literally) then the SSD market will take a long time to replace current hard drive technologies due to performance issues.  The current SSD units on market are considerably slower than current hard drive technologies especially with random read and write operations.  Hopefully they double or triple the performance every time they double the capacity to make it worth while.

Microsoft has revealed Live Mesh.  A new Windows Live platform that can sync all of your Applications and Data with all of your devices.  Cool feature but only limited to Windows operating systems, which we already assumed.  Mesh also allows you to setup a virtual desktop online and connect all of your computers to it.  This way you can copy or move files from one PC to another seamlessly.  Currently the platform only works with Windows XP or Vista but hopefully they’ll expand this to Apple and (doesn’t hold his breath) Linux.  This platform should of been made years ago but Microsoft is still on the offense with its interoperability conquest.  See the full article and additional details at TechCrunch.com.

Yikes.  The whole point of using Linux in the first place was to reduce costs and problems.  OLPC has announced that they might dump Linux from their XO laptops in exchange for Microsoft’s Windows XP operating system.  It appears that Microsoft has gotten into bed with the OLPC and has rubbed someone the right way to make such a drastic change.  The OLPC has been praised for going with Linux in the first place.  I wonder how the OLPC fans will react.

The US Federal Communications Committee chairman Kevin Martin see’s that Comcast’s own definition of ‘delayed’ is hogwash.  Comcast swears on their mothers grave that they just delay this traffic but independent tests say otherwise.  Tests have shown that Comcast’s networks prevent users from “seeding” P2P uploads after they finished downloading content.  Comcast’s network then analyzes these data packets and uses a forged “reset flag” to break the P2P connections.  The tests have shown that this “delayed” technique, or so thy say, is used 24/7.

Electronic Arts has seen the rest of the industry shift into a mobile market.  Apple has been dominating since the introduction of the iPhone in this sector.  Google still has its Android platform in the works but it’s still sometime before they can release to the masses.  EA along with Hasbro have been working to push into the mobile gaming market.  They release the classic game Monopoly for mobile devices but do not enable the online multiplayer option.  They claim that the European market is ‘too fragmented’ to make this feasible.  The Inquirer reports.

Just when Google released better than expected Q1 08 earnings they get hit with a nice lawsuit.  The Plaintiff, David Almeida, who wants to make his case a class action lawsuit claims that Adwords customers that leave the “cost-per-click” content bid box blank when they filled in the CPC form were being erroneously charged.  The Adwords customers have control over how much they can set each CPC unit for but David says that if you leave it entirely blank you still get charged anyways.  He also claims that Google never mentions it anywhere on their website regarding this policy.

Most likely, Google probably has some sort of clause in the terms & conditions agreement regarding this.  If they don’t it’s a different story.  But I’m sure it’s stated some where in fine print.  They have teams of lawyers that look out for this sort of thing.