News Roundup and update

So my christmas got a little interrupted by a bad case of breaking my leg, living in Norway there will always be that risk, especially if you're in a hurry and too cheap to buy decent winter shoes.

So I want to start with a news roundup of some of the very relevant things that has happened since I've been away.

The biggest event was probably the nVidia and Intel settlement, but another big event was the fact that AMD fired Dirk Meyer, and later had two high ranking board members leave, the fact that Dirk Meyers got fired seems to be because he wasn't visionary enough to get on the Tablet wave, which is an explenation that doesn't entirely make sense to me, there's no real Windows Tablet out there, they are coming for sure, but we've yet to see them in sale, Acer probably has the most interesting one, namely the one using the revised C-50 CPU from AMD that has a TDP of only 5W while still being able to handle HD and operate at 1GHz, but again they've shown it at conferences, it doesn't seem to be out yet, so I don't know how he missed it since it has barely started and the Ontario with a few tweaks seems to be the "guy" for the job.

The fact that Intel and nVidia settles is interesting. Does this mean nVidia and Intel will play nice? Maybe, but my guess is only for a limited time, nVidia wants in on the Personal Computer market, which is why they are agressively developing ARM soc's and nVidia won't think twice before challenging Intel if they think they have the advantage, and seeing how aggressive nVidia has been with Tegra, and the fact that they compared it to a Core 2 Duo is a clear shot at X86.

The third huge development was of course the release of Sandy Bridge and the Cougar Point Chipset fail.
Sandy Bridge came out, offering impressive numbers, and currently all eyes are on AMD's upcoming bulldozer, in fact certain forums are full of speculation threads about Bulldozer, Anyway Intel continued their tradition of changing the socket and chipset you need to use it, ok in Sandy Bridge's example it makes sense because of the built in GPU and you would probably need to change the overall design a bit to accomedate that, the frustrating point is though how often Intel does this when it seems unnecessary(LGA 775 may have been used for a long time but you needed to chance chipset constantly if you wanted the next big thing.) the problem was however shortly after the release and people had started to recieve their SB motherboards and CPU's Intel started a recall, this was due to a problem in the South Bridge in the new Sata controller, the details of the issue is somewhat irrelevant, the interesting part is why it wasn't discovered earlier, clearly Intel is supposed to have experience with building this technology, and as some blogs and articles has pointed out, Intel usually finds these issues through their extensive testing, it has been speculated that Intel did this to save money, that may sound wierd considering Intel expects to pay about $1bn when this is all over, but the fact is their stocks barely moved, and just 1% down would mean Intel loses over a billion dollars of their value, as Intel is currently worth $117bn.

But I don't know to be honest, Intel might have the facilities to test extensively, but thinking back it's definitely not beyond Intel to find out they screwed up after they released the product. I think this is fairly common with a company over 15times the size of it's closest competitor, we see it very often that companies like Microsoft and so on neglect quality control, simply because of the lack of competition.

I hope to get to update this blog and finally get my page up and running as soon as possible.

Touchpads vs Trackpoints

This is mostly just a random like post, but also something that I find that I feel strongly about.

So most of us my age would probably start by getting a somewhat cheap laptop, my first laptop was a strange laptop that I found out was actually produced by ECS, or a daughter company to them, had I known that before I bought it, even back then I would not have done it, but this laptop also came as a Fujitsu Siemens laptop and a few others, it had a nice screen 15.4" at a resolution we sadly almost never see in 15" laptops, 1680x1050, the keyboard was nice, and it only had a touch pad, and for the longest while I was perfectly happy with that, but as I said this was made by ECS so slowly but surely the laptop broke, the PSU died, battery died, screen started getting stripes, it was the typical ECS experience, anyway when it Died I was almost done with my education, and considering the lenght of my education, that was pretty well done, anyway, I did some work for my brother as he was starting a company and in return he would get me a laptop, now I had seen a laptop I had chosen for him some months before, and it was a Lenovo T61 because my brother works as a carpenter, so the laptop needs to be quite durable, and I knew from what people had said IBM/Lenovo T-series are some of the best, unless you get those military laptops or Toughbooks but yes.

So I said I would love to get one of those, it ended up becoming the Lenovo T500, not that I would complain, except for the horrible GMA 4500 it was quite a nice laptop, the thing I noticed was instantly I was completely compelled to use the trackpoint, I think I did use the touchpad mostly in the beginning, but the fact that you can use your mouse without moving your hands is just a feature I can't help but praise, I know it sounds lazy, but I've had this laptop for about 2 years now, and honestly it's worth if considering how quick and precise you can go from typing to moving the mouse. Lately though I've been looking for a new laptop, not because this is outdated, it's actually still fast and just works, but because I do want one that is a bit smaller, and doesn't come with Intel graphics(The world would be a better place without ECS and Intel graphics)
But I found myself looking for certain features, and sometimes I would find the perfect laptop, but the lack of a trackpoint just gets to me, so I will most likely pay up and get a Lenovo again, this time though I'm looking for one without Intel graphics.

So yeah touchpads are fine, but the trackpoints, once you get use to it is a feature you would want it to be mandatory on every keyboard.

On a quick note though, I've worked with certain Dell computers, some of them pull off the trackpoint ok(Like the old D630), but some others, like the E6410 is a damn pain on standard settings, because not only is it hyper sensitive, some brainiac thought you should be able to click on it, a feature made in hell, because when you get use to not resting your finger on it and decide you want to try and click on it, you just end up making a mess on your desktop or in whatever document you were working on, the safest approach would to just get a Lenovo.

*UPDATE*
I fell at the end of November and broke my leg, and sadly I landed on my T500, it hit the motherboard somehow that made it simply not boot, you can see where there was most pressure, and it was underneath it just under the north bridge.