Intel Finally Including an Integrated Memory Controller

It's taken what, 4 years? Intel has decided that removing the frontside bus roadblock for communication between memory and the CPU might be a good idea.

Even though Intel has been handing AMD its hat since the introduction of their Core 2 Duo processors, they've been dependent on a separate chip on the motherboard to coordinate i/o between the CPU & RAM.

AMD figured this out in 2003 by placing the memory controller on the CPU die. IBM and Sun have done the same. With their 13 or 14 fabrication plants, it seems that Intel has been only incrementally releasing the good stuff when they could be further pummeling AMD. Intel's manufacturing methods are on a process half the size of AMD's, so addtional features and power savings should be readily available to the consumer. How is all that extra die space being used? Yet another core? How about placing some real goodies on there, like embedding VMWare, increasing cache size, and adding some sort of monitoring that can interface with applications for instruction optimization over time? Intel has incredible engineers, let's see some of their innovations!

Google Angering Mobile Phone Companies & Becoming a Giant US ISP

Whether or not Google actually ends up buying the 700-MHz band, an additional player/competitor toying with multi-billion dollar spectrum is not pleasant for Verizon, AT&T, and Sprint. Such are the effects of capitalism - go Google!

Bob Cringely puts Google's 700MHz plans in perspective in his latest post - here's a taste:
"Imagine a hybrid wireless broadband mesh network using 700-MHz connections for backhaul and some truly mobile links and WiFi for local service."

With the aggregate of personal information supplied by users googling their search terms(especially while signed in to a google account such as Gmail), Google's servers aboundeth with information as to that which is being searched, purchased, emailed(your friend's Gmail emails are indexed as well), and blogged. Google owns the servers running this blog.

Mobile internet access is about to change very quickly.

Royalty Free Music

Looking for some music to include in a multimedia project, or maybe on a telephone system? These tracks are high quality and royalty-free. The author requires Attribution under a Creative Commons license, and accepts donations.

I enjoyed the African and Celtic tracks - here's one example.

Software for Starving Students 2007.09 Released

I've been heavily involved in the Software for Starving Students project for about 2 years. I believe it's the only free collection of software available with OS X & Windows concurrent releases, and we _encourage_ folks to copy our CDs and give them away.

The cost of a college education is always increasing -- usually faster than students can earn money. We hope our efforts will help lower students' software costs.

We enthusiastically support the concept of free/open software and standards, but our primary concern is that students have access to high-quality software, free of charge. If a software title could be useful for students and is free of charge, we'll seek permission to include it even if it is not open source. We've also chosen to license our contributions to the disc (the interface, etc.) such that it must remain free of charge.

The 2007.09 release of Software for Starving Students is now available for download at: http://softwarefor.org/downloads.html -- Software for Starving Students is a free collection of programs organized with students' needs in mind, but beneficial for everyone. Windows and Mac OS X CDs are available, torrents are live!

2007 Utah Open Source Conference Ends Today

The 2007 Utah Open Source Conference has been an amazing experience full of geek energy and spirit. Conference attendees, keynote speakers, breakout presenters, and conference organizers have done an amazing job of creating a wonderful, fun, well executed event. Sometimes I wanted to attend multiple breakout sessions being held at the same time, but had to choose just one!

Hopefully some audio and or video of breakout sessions will be posted soon.

I fully expect that UTOSC will double in size in 2008.

Congratulations to Clint Savage on bringing his idea of the Utah Open Source Conference to fruition.